


The Poetry in Blood

by amusedperson



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon Divergence - written before Compilation, Death, F/M, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, not mine, possible trigger warnings missed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 18:41:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 45,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3620268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amusedperson/pseuds/amusedperson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Long after Hojo locked him away in a crypt, Vincent wakes up to exact revenge. Fuelled by his own anger and that of the monsters inside him, he terrorizes the ShinRa mansion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Screwing with Destiny

**Author's Note:**

> I did not write this story, but I have been given permission to post it. It’s very good and I feel it is a loss not to have the new generation of Final Fantasy VII lovers read it. As you read, please keep in mind that this was written in 1999, before the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII came out.
> 
> Also, this story is complete. I will be posting chapters every week or two in hopes thty it can reach many people while not waiting too long. I am not fishing for reviews. If I were to post the story all at once, it would be easily lost amongst the many other stories being posted . Thank you for your patience with this lengthy note and I hope you enjoy this wonderfully written fanfiction.
> 
> Disclaimer: Not only do I not own Final Fantasy VII. I didn’t even write this story.

Nibelheim tonight was warm and sticky. Hovering just above the Shinra Mansion's western gable hung a crooked quarter moon. Yellow splotched with brown, it had the same rubbery texture of a rotten banana, as though it had glanced to earth and seen something that left it queasy. Wispy, smoke-coloured clouds wiped sweat from its clammy forehead and bled a sour rain that coated everything below with stink.  


The Shinra Mansion especially glistened, sticking out of Nibelheim like an abandoned movie prop. The scent of fresh paint and new lumber still permeated the air around its bent and self-conscious new architecture, blown to the citizens of Nibelheim on the occasionally chilly, mountain gust. The dampness of the town was already blackening the boards and lending the mansion a gothic elegance. Mako having leaked from the tanks in the underground labs, tough vines and creepers flourished, defying the sere dust and shadows to claim the mansion's outer walls, insinuating like a cancer in the virginal woods. The yellow moon lit the creeping ivy strangely tonight. It looked like fuzzy mold on a corpse.  


Dozens of tall windows ringed the Shinra mansion's walls, each capped with a pointed arch. Their panes caught the eerie light of the nauseated moon and glared now like eyes from behind the vines. On the second floor, near the far end of the eastern terrace behind a scrim of dusty lace, a white face was peering out onto Nibelheim's empty streets.  


There wasn't much to see. Nibelheim made a pretty postcard, rural and antiquated; most men would appreciate the bucolic shift in scenery after a lifetime in Midgar's grey, urban sprawl. Here, picturesque light posts shed a gassy, mako glow over spiraling cobblestones and brick walls softened with moss and time. The buildings were old world and quaint, the sorts of shacks they took photos of and made into jigsaw puzzles for old women and convalescents. The dilapidated well and water tower could play backdrop to a melodramatic retelling of Loveless. Well, perhaps it couldn't tonight. Nibelheim's players had abandoned the stage. The rough men of the mountain town rose early each morning to toil anew. They could not put off sleep to stare out a window and contemplate the mansion the way that mansion was contemplating Nibelheim. They couldn't afford the extravagance of insomnia. Only Vincent Valentine was decadent enough to be so irresponsibly wakeful, staring into an ill moon and listening to a Turk sermonize.  


Jimmy talked often to fill the frequent silences between himself and his taciturn partner. It had been that way the entire seven months they'd been assigned to the Shinra Mansion, reluctant Turks playing bodyguards to - as it had been put to them - some of the greatest scientific minds on the planet. Ha. Great minds. Possibly. If eccentricity was any sign of genius, Vincent thought he shouldn't scoff...  


"Don't stand there and ignore me!" Jimmy demanded furiously. Vincent gave a gentle start and the curtain whispered about his jaw like fae wings. "Listen to me now. This isn't worth it... D'you fucking understand?! This isn't worth losing six years of your life over. Just leave it be! The situation doesn't like you and it hasn't from the start!"  


"So I walk away?" whispered Vincent numbly, shrugging Jimmy's friendly hand from his shoulder and refusing to turn. The stinking, steaming, empty street was more interesting than the Turk's lecture or the mansion full of doubt. "I can't walk away from this and leave her to be sacrificed in the name of a dubious science... I love her. Do you not get that?"  


"Love her? Try thinking with your brain and not your dick for once--"  


"It isn't like that," Vincent protested, staring sternly out onto Nibelheim and despising the familiarity of the view. Oh, but what a lie that was. He knew he didn't really despise this dreamy mountain village. Not anymore. With very little effort, he could associate the distant Nibel Mountains with her; they had walked the purple paths like somnambulists by evening, staring at the way the moon danced its cold, white fingers over the serrated peaks. Every indentation in the horizon was a memory; there, for instance, through that dip on Mt. Nibel, he had pointed out a gorgeous sunset and she had clutched his arm like a child, as though seeing the dusk for the first time. The tangerine light had set her golden hair aflame. He had dipped his hands into it and moved her face to his.  


How obliviating was a kiss. It was a small death, stripping the imagination of even its darkest solicitudes; no thoughts of Hojo, the Turks, or Shinra had been able to disturb the precious peace of that sunset kiss.  


Vincent Valentine ruminated upon that now as he gazed on empty Nibelheim. Of all people, how could he ever explain his feelings for Lucrecia to Jimmy? He would sound like a sentimental idiot, drunk on lust and blinded by tits and ass. That's all Jimmy understood afterall. His knowledge of love came from the blood and heat of the Honeybee Inn. Vincent was certain his relationship with Lucrecia transcended all of that; made every furtive coupling he'd ever blundered through in his twenty-seven years seem like a crime. Simultaneously, Lucrecia could undo that guilt with a glance and a touch. Could he get Jimmy to understand that his buddy Vincent couldn't ignore her dilemma or their love anymore than he could ignore a knife in the heart?  


His words were so clumsy. He wished he could simply gash his ribcage open and show his besotted heart, aching and longing and slowly suffocating behind his necktie.  
But all he could insipidly mutter was a wan, "I love her."  


Jimmy shook his head.  


"That means nothing. You're a kid if you think it does."  
"Astounding advice from a guy whose greatest love is still his mother. Love means something. It has to. I don't care what you think, or if you want to dismiss me as the most pathetic romantic to ever fall victim to a pair of pretty eyes."  


"Damn the torpedoes, but Vincent Valentine's turned into a shitty paperback," Jimmy snarled, disgusted. Romance he could stand, but impracticality was a sticking point. "Doesn't make two shits worth of difference. You can love her until I shoot you to shut you up but she gave her answer. When you flashed that ring in her face, she said no." Jimmy put his hand on his friend's shoulder again but the comforting gesture had become a confrontational grinding of bone.  


"She said no," Vincent admitted bitterly, his right hand dropping into his pocket and stroking the little box clinking against gil pieces and lint. "But it was Hojo that made her do it. She won't leave him. He... he won't let her."  


"You're deluding yourself, man. She loves him. I've seen the way she looks at him. That aside, she's too scared to leave the cush life she's got going on here; lose her career, financial security, these fucking posh accommodations, just to run off and have a fling with you when she's got a husband pulling in more gil than trigger monkeys like us ever will."  


It sounded so dirty and common coming out of Jimmy's mouth. Vincent bristled, hands fisting in his pockets.  


"So ballsy of you though," the other Turk continued, "Flinging that proposal, that ring in a married woman's face." Jimmy sounded hurt. He was an unremarkable young man with a big heart and an obsessive nature. A lot like his friend Vincent only a much clearer thinker with a more realistic outlook on the world. There was no poetry in blood. He'd never understood the beauty of suffering. That's what this unnecessarily sentimental bullshit amounted to. If Vincent intruded on the Shinra scientists' business over a stupid love affair, he would get himself fired. President Shinra was a responsible weaver of great works and did not suffer loose ends. When Turks went awol or lost their way, he took care of them. Jimmy saw no poetry in dying over unrequited love. In his unclouded eyes, dying just meant dying. And that was the tragic ending Vincent seemed eagerly leaping towards.  


"Professor Hojo's a freaking loony," he hissed through the gloom, trying to capture Vincent's elusive eyes. He wriggled his fingers near his forehead for emphasis. "He's so possessive he gets twitchy when she leaves the grounds to meet the supply truck. He forbids her from even visiting the trading post now. And with that baby she's carrying, that experiment as far along as it is, there's no way in hell you'd both get out of here."  


"We could try."  


"And you could die. You think they won't send SOLDIERs after you?"  


"That's absurd. They wouldn't touch us. I'm a Turk, Jimmy. We're Shinra Company Turks. The President would come over here and personally order the gory liquidation of anyone who so much as broke wind in our direction, whether they were on the local football team or the Shinra R&D payroll." Vincent crossed his arms tight over his chest, watching the doorway. Through it, a seldom used bedroom lay obscured by purple gloom, its rear stone wall catching the dispersed lantern light of the hall and glistening. That very wall led to the crux of the situation - the Library. Lucrecia was there. He was probably there. And Vincent was only an unauthorized stooge lacking the clout to do anything but stand by and hope the pair of them wouldn't do anything stupid in his absence. Passion almost raised his hand towards that hidden passageway suddenly. Clear as blood on snow he recalled how mere hours ago he'd watched Lucrecia shrinking downstairs, that cold stone wall slamming shut with an awful finality. He'd allowed her to descend alone, unprotesting, just as he did every morning. All he could do was narrow his brown eyes and grimace. Even now she was in that unnatural place, in the thrall of two monsters, a helpless tool of those irreverent Shinra science techs - all of them failing to see the golden-haired angel in their midsts as they orbited instead around a slick-skinned horror in a transparent cage.  


His seeking hand dropped impotently back into his pocket, fingernails thudding against the rejected box. "I don't care that she said no," he whispered softly to himself, "I'm an irredeemable idiot, perhaps, but I would still do anything in the world for her."  


"You god damned lunatic, I--!"  


"That doesn't mean I want to die!"  


Vincent shoved Jimmy aside and marched into the bedroom, his expression jagged and pale as though something had been sundered inside and he was hemorrhaging to death. Nothing good was ever won with words alone. Decisive action would settle this and convince all parties involved that Vincent Valentine could do more than merely speak his heart - he could act in its name too.  


"Vincent--!"  


Jimmy's scarred, lean hands made a bracelet around his friend's arm and wrenched him back into the shadows. "Stop it! It's Professor Hojo!" he hissed, "I hear him on the stairs!"  
If this was supposed to startle Vincent into submission, it didn't work. Rather, the name ignited the smoldering coals in the Turk's brown eyes and he curled his upper lip into his nose, snarling the name like a malediction. When that pointy-chinned, four-eyed, greasy-haired monster's actual, hated countenance melted from the darkness of the far hallway and tilted towards the Turks, Jimmy had to grab his partner's right hand to keep it from going to his gun.  


"You have the self-control of a two year old," he reprimanded in a whisper. And it was true. Vincent's anger was a weapon, conquering his self-doubt and pushing him to act in situations that, at one time, his uncertainty had crippled him in. There was far more explosive potential in his fury than in any hand cannon. Allowed to burn now, however, and the conflagration would take Vincent with it. Hojo was untouchable.  


Vincent scowled at the reprimand but it restored his wits. He buried his rage deep and sucked air through his nose, straightening, running a hand through his cropped black hair. By the time Hojo had reached them from the stairs, the Turk looked nearly nonchalant.  


"Evening, James," called the Professor, waving a careless hand in Jimmy's direction. The young Turk nodded curtly, wincing at Vincent's feral, sub audible snarl. The snarl was nearly a roar when Hojo passed them both and entered the bedroom, never acknowledging Vincent with either a word of greeting or dismissal. The snub was palpable in the air as the usual sounds came then; the clunk of shaky gears grinding as the stone passageway leading below cycled through its routine, finally slamming open with a dusty creak. Footsteps next, and the scientist's soft whistling. A wavering keening, they could hear the song catch eerily at the ceiling and walls as Hojo skipped downstairs, his hair a greasy black cap on his sallow head. The Turks flinched when the passage shut again, abandoning them to a quivering stillness.  


"She'll do it," Vincent insisted. Jimmy looked sharply to him, eyes wide and disbelieving. "She'll do it tonight. She has to. We fought last evening about it... fought for hours... fought so loudly I was certain we'd be found out. Anyway, she knows now. I spelled it out so plainly for her that even her abstract mind ought to be able to process the explanation of a hired gun. Him or me. Him or me. It's decided tonight. No more flip-flopping and there sure as hell will not be anymore putting me off."  


Jimmy folded his arms over his ribs, tapping his fingers against each elbow. Vincent's desperation was fighting with rare hope; the battlefield was his white countenance and the war was not going well. Jimmy couldn't believe he was able to make himself ask, "What if she chooses him?"  


His friend's jaw tensed at the question, molars grinding behind pursed lips. Muscles twitched in his temples and his eyes were shaded and hungry. He whispered his answer, turning again to the window and staring at the night-black mountains. "If she is happy, then I don't mind." 

________________________________________  


Hojo thought he was possessed of not only a scientifically inclined mind - one rapacious for logical answers in an illogical world - but of an artistically inclined mind as well. He could appreciate the aesthetically immaculate phenomenon of this spiral staircase. The spiral was one of the most powerful, prevalent structures in nature after all. It had been an amusing stroke of good fortune when the surveyors had discovered this ancient, practically pristine passage, ready for restoration. They had decided to build the library and labs into the network of crypts and sepulchers to which it led. Hojo could appreciate the result and did so every day; the beautiful contrast of high technology, cold and steel against the organic lines and crumbling comfort of the old, dry crypts. He could appreciate this spiral staircase; it was like a birth canal, passing the seeking mind from the womb of ignorance to the bright world of discovery and innovation downstairs, where Jenova was kept.  


But the spiral staircase did manage to make him dizzy as hell on the climbs up and down. Unfortunate Professor Hojo was cursed with a slight inner ear problem and allergies that could be irritated by as little as a passing mouse. So daily, in his journey to the crypts from the second floor of the dusty Shinra mansion, Hojo emerged nauseous, dizzy, and unable to take a deep breath for the mold in the air.  


Such was Shinra efficiency. It had looked good in a spreadsheet, so they'd gone with it. It had been thought that the gothic, gaudy architecture of the mansion would enhance the natural mountain beauty of Nibelheim, at the same time pacifying the locals and dismissing itself from their attention. A contemporary, concrete and steel structure would of course have been more appropriate for use as a research facility. Sterility and spacial issues aside, it wouldn't have let in every draft that blew down from the distant Nibel mountains as this mansion's thin wooden walls did. It would have provided beds enough to accommodate all those on the Jenova Project research team. Oh, but trivialities all! These were the concerns of the plebeian mind and they did not jive with the grand vision of President Shinra's avant-garde architects, bright-eyed and conceptually-confused after four years confined in an art academy. They had thought living in a gothic mansion would raise the team's spirits. Their psychology classes 

had left them useless.  
Hojo did like the Shinra mansion an awful lot, he guessed. Drafty and impractical, yes, but it was beautiful; dark and elegant, full of dusty warm corners and hidden nooks in which to curl up and read. It was like the Junon coastal cottage he recalled from his early childhood, putting him oddly at ease. The distant purple mountains might each threaten him with crags sharp and hooked as an old crones' fingers, but when the mists of morning obscured them and a brilliant orange sun shone off the granite as dusk descended, those peaks became the pointed tongs of a crown. All the Nibel mountains ringed the mansion companionably then, protectively, and Hojo liked them. Yes, despite the impracticality of the entire ordeal, Hojo was very fond of all of it.  


Except for this blasted spiral staircase!  


But how could he complain now? He'd just snubbed Vincent Valentine and snubbed him quite well. With secret glee, he'd discerned the quiet fury in those shadowed, cowardly eyes as the scientist had paid him no more mind than he paid the beetles in the walls. Oh, the fair-faced prick could have his jollies with 'Crecia, there was little Hojo could do about that, but he wouldn't think upon the adulterous snake like a human being. No, he was only like a bit of irritating, ineluctable bad weather, blotting out the sun but too brutish and slow to stay the hand of science, or permanently mar the deepest joys of natural love. Hojo wouldn't address such a meaningless phenomenon nor please it with common courtesies. Perhaps this was a lame response to the advances upon his wife by another man but it was better than pretending he didn't know what they were doing at all.  


He could respond more appropriately, of course, if he were only more physically inclined. Then he could kick Vincent Valentine's taciturn white ass. He could break his beautiful face and knock the perfect smile out of his mouth. There'd be nothing left to kiss, not with a ventilator in the way.  


But for now, simple snubbing would have to suffice.  


The young scientist sighed and laughed, feeling foolish. He shot out a hand to steady himself as he descended, his scuffed black loafers picking up every speck of renegade mildew and dust that had inexorably returned to the reappropriated passage. He breathed shallowly, denying his allergies the mold but his eyes began to tear behind his glasses anyway and his nose tingled until he had to mash at it with his knuckles. Seven months and already the dust of the dead had returned to infect these stairs and the passages below with filth! The macabre elegance of the place wasn't complete until time had touched it and cobwebs softened all the eaves. This couldn't be the 'Shinra Mansion' until it had been properly aged and poetically warped. It was poetic; if not practical it was poetic, and statistics showed that poetry lived longer. Hojo could admit to that.  


He loved poetry. Everything was a representation. Symbols were everywhere. Each person was a microcosm of the world at large and each person - every one of their works - should strive to be beautiful. Vincent and 'Crecia... Hojo could see the beauty there. They suppurated with poetry. He could appreciate it the way he appreciated this mansion - all of it save for... save for... save for these God-damned spiral stairs!  


His left foot caught clumsily on a loose board and the scientist would have flown forward to a broken neck if a bony arm hadn't been locked on the railing. He gave a little cry and leapt the last five steps, squinting his watering eyes at the sudden light on the crypt level. The soft glow of civilization beckoned from the savage, poetic jungle of the manse. There was his Library. His Laboratory. His small kingdom. Here he could leave behind things like poetically spiraled staircases, how proper his wife looked with another man, and the looming architecture of a gothic facade. In this refuge hid his life's work and his life's love. Here awaited his immortality.  


"Professor Gast!" he called, leaving the decay of the crypts behind and trotting enthusiastically down a short, immaculately scrubbed corridor. "Sir! I have those papers for you, sir!"  


Hojo's wife answered: "The Professor's retired for the day. His eyes were bothering him."  


Hojo breezed into the lab and smiled at the bell tone of Lucrecia's voice. She was tired and he was bitter, but her presence was a panacea. Lucrecia herself was a magic spell. She looked up briefly at his entrance, green eyes exhausted behind wire rims. A clipboard awkward with notes on yellow steno paper was perched in one hand and every second it grew more abstruse as she added volumes of numbers in tiny penmanship. Hojo's sharp black eyes lingered on her a moment, enchanted. The gleam of glass and the wet gargling of chemicals pulled him away though, and his smile faded as he approached the complicated tank holding the Jenova specimen. Behind an obfuscating curtain of murky formaldehyde and wires, a beautiful face hovered suspended like an angel's, her features hard as marble; as cold and hard as the ice they'd pulled her from. Her flesh was a bruised lavender, slick and flawless but veined by dull scarlet in places. Huge structures like flightless wings sprouted from her back. They had the texture of coral, their perforations streaking the creature in strange shadows as the filter's bubbles tickled over her belly and throat sensuously. With his eyes, Hojo inspected the face as he always did, fixating on her soft, unsmiling lips and the perfect little nostrils; the shadowed sockets and gentle jaw. Lucrecia watched him watching her. She looked jaded.  


"Were you afraid it wouldn't be here, love?" she asked, trying to smile. Hojo flickered his attention her way a moment and smiled too, though it was thin. Cheer was as difficult in the laboratory as in a city morgue. The somber stare of the thing in the bubbling tank was accusatory. Lucrecia glared uncompromisingly at it, peering past the alien beauty - the whore's breasts and the pursed lips. She saw tissue and mysteries; struggling blue veins on bloated skin, wires jammed through subverted flesh, the marks of time, the scars of gangrenous and frostbitten damage from its ancient, icy prison. Lucrecia thought it was the ugliest creature on the planet. If this "Jenova", as it had been named, truly was an Ancient, all of the human race was fortunate that the foul monsters had passed into ignominious extinction.  


As always, it was difficult for Hojo to turn his attention from the specimen and refocus it on his wife but he managed it, tumbling past on a breeze of scholastic industry and quickly brushing her lips with his. Her perfume passed between them. He could smell it on his clothes as he moved to the bookshelves. He thought of a cocktail bar and a room wild with painted women and strutting men. "If you're tired, love, please turn in," he called, "No doubt you've earned the day's paycheck. You know it isn't good for you or the baby when you strain yourself. It is my opinion that if your restfulness increases the likelihood of positive results, then it's just as important, if not moreso, than the application of your wakeful brilliance upon our humble Project."  


"I can't argue your logic," Lucrecia whispered. Hojo turned with furrowed brows to watch her bent back and examine the cloying halo of light radiated by her softly auburn hair. He heard something cold in her tone, distantly hateful behind the weariness and pain. But that had been there a while, hadn't it? And there really wasn't anything Hojo might do about it. She was so beautiful and smelled so good sometimes he forgot it was over. The poetry was lost in the lie. How perfect she and Valentine must look together, like a prince and princess from a faerie story. He and Lucrecia had never managed that themselves. Adoration had improved his sunken cheeks a while, and put a sparkle in his calculating black eyes, but that had been before. That had been then.  


He turned away, something inexplicable dancing at the back of his mind. Fangs gnashed against his ribcage, gnawing on a hard heart like a wolf with a nubby bone. She was so, so beautiful, he thought clearly. If the baby looked anything like her, he wondered if he would be able to quash his conscience enough to carry through with the treatments, the tests, the studies. Better that it look like him or, best of all, that it emerge a mishapen horror, a mutated, twisted creature to which he could never develop an attachment. Best that way for Lucrecia too.  


"How are you feeling today, by the way?" he asked, sliding a thick tome from the bookshelf and thumbing through it. Lucrecia glanced at him and watched the reflected white of the pages flash in his glasses. "You rushed out of bed so quickly this morning I hadn't the chance to ask. I wandered around for an hour earlier trying to find you. I approached a few of the Turks, the soldiers, the techs... no one had seen you. Did you go into town for breakfast?"  


"I went shopping actually," she replied, rising stiffly from her chair. Laying her work aside, she paced the room with slow steps, a hand on her swollen belly. "I wanted to indulge myself. I needed a while alone before I'm shut up in a room like Jenova there without a moment of peace for my own thoughts. It was good to see the mountains and chat with the miners' wives for a while. Sorry to worry you, love."  


"No, I wasn't worried," Hojo admonished with a dry laugh, "With all the security running around, there's no safer place in the world than Nibelheim. I was only curious. But really, how are you? Any more spotting? Any abnormalities?"  


It was Lucrecia's turn to laugh as she moved towards the door. The blood and the pain were her secrets. "I've never been pregnant before," she reminded him softly, "I wouldn't know."  


"Come now, don't play coy with me," he scolded with forced cheer, glancing up from his book, "But I trust you enough not to press you, I suppose. No news is good news, right?"  


"Yes."  


She didn't want to tell him or Gast about the trials of the last few weeks. The survival of each night was a small triumph by morning, and her breast fluttered with hot panic at the thought of any of these men being made privy to her nocturnal torments. She bit her lips bloody by night to keep from crying out in pain and waking the stranger beside her. She couldn't understand why her thrashing never roused him when the fevers came, or why her vomiting in the tiny bathroom down the hall never caused him to stir, or ask after her in the morning. He was a heavy sleeper, she supposed. He worked hard. So why didn't she simply explain to him how she felt? Why did she want to keep these secrets? It was all important data, and it should all be made plain for the sake of the Project.  


Lucrecia felt her husband's eyes on her but she wouldn't turn around to meet them anymore than she would press her forehead to an assassin's gun. Ah, maybe she would die and take this unfortunate, unborn child with her. That had been her horrible wish months ago when Hojo first began to distance himself from her, taken away by an obsession she barely understood but desperately attempted to become a part of. It was different now. Cruel hope had insinuated itself in her heart and Lucrecia couldn't imagine being separated from Vincent. Even standing in the lab basked in the ugly glow from the Jenova tank, the cold air conditioning of the library, and the artificial lights, Lucrecia could recall with crystal clarity brown-eyed Vincent Valentine yelling at her last night in the muggy gardens. He'd been so angry, frustrated in a way he'd barely been able to verbalize. Now, Lucrecia had to stop her hand from moving to caress a phantom. From across the lab Jenova watched, silently accusing her as she stood in the same quiet room as her husband and fantasized about another man. Blameless, here was Vincent all the same behind Lucrecia's eyes and she saw his jaw tighten, the flesh tense around his nose as he struggled against forces he barely comprehended. He was helpless and frustrated by his helplessness. Last night had been awful for him. She had watched him turn his anger inwards, furious because he'd never been angry with her and didn't know how to deal with it now.  


Maybe he'll blame Hojo. Perhaps Gast, or one of his Turk friends, Lucrecia thought. But he would never blame her. He didn't know how. She understood her confused lover far better than he'd ever be able to understand himself. She feared for him in his inexplicable innocence. What was he but a naive little boy walking around with a gun? He could strangle a man or snipe a senator from a rooftop, but he couldn't puzzle out his idiotic, flighty girlfriend. It made Lucrecia laugh through her tears.  


"--Lucrecia? Lucrecia?"  


"...what?"  


Hojo had called her name five times already. "Go to bed," he insisted, worried, "You look positively wiped. I look in your eyes and it's like there's no one there. Go upstairs now. Rest yourself and the baby. I'll be up later tonight."  


"Maybe you're right," she admitted listlessly. Why had she let a silly eighteen year old fall in love with this man? Patience... she'd never had it. Never! She still didn't. The urge to obey Vincent's crazy proposal and accept what he'd offered inside of that little velvet box was intense. She might easily replace Hojo's tarnished ring with something that could shine again. She did love Vincent, after all; loved him so much it left her breathless. She loved what she'd discovered behind the mask of the assassin, loved the little boy from Wutai whose life had been hell. She wanted to be his peace. Her eyes misted with happy tears at the thought.  


Like a reminder from Jenova, the baby kicked in her stomach. Lucrecia felt sick.  


"Love," she addressed Hojo, the pet name a habit.  


"Hmm?"  


"It isn't too late," she whispered, "We could abort it now. We could make it like it never happened."  
"'Crecia!" Hojo laughed, shocked, "I can't believe you! You've cold feet, that's all it is. Didn't we make a pact? We both want the top, and we're both going to get it. This little creature will win us all that we so desire. Stop worrying when I'm taking such good care of you both."  


The top... He was doing this for more than mere professional recognition, Lucrecia was certain of it. That specimen... that ancient... sometimes... but no, that was madness. Jenova was not only dead and powerless, but had been so for two-thousand years. The monster in the bubbling glass tube was hardly a threat to their marriage. Hardly a threat to her Hojo. Her Hojo. But he wasn't hers anymore. And she didn't want the callous monster that Jenova and ambition had made of him. If Vincent was here for her, she just didn't mind. She could have her new lover and Hojo could have his. And this unborn child even now in her womb, bobbing in a dark world of chemicals - God help it.  


Lucrecia prayed for conclusions. The deceit couldn't continue. It had gone on for too long. If there was something she could to do end it, now was the time to find the bravery to act, even if her hands were tied and everything revolved around the Project. Damn the Project! It had stolen Hojo from her, and that was a wound not even the gift of Vincent could truly alleviate.  


In some ways she hated this baby in her stomach; in others, she loved it. But worst of all perhaps, she realised that this tiny life was a nonissue compared to the desires of her heart and the requirements of her sanity. She had become just as monstrous as Hojo to dismiss it so, but didn't it speak well for her that she could recognise her own selfishness?  


"But what if I said that I... that I insist we abandon this."  


Where had that come from? It took Lucrecia a moment to realize she'd asked the question aloud. Hojo looked up slowly from his reading, his expression blank.  


"If you suggested something so foolish," he began coldly, "I would have to be very upset, dear heart. Too much time and money have gone into this. Professor Gast would never allow it besides."  


"I think he might if I talked to him, explained things...."  


"Why this change of heart?" Hojo put the book down and approached her slowly, each step deliberate and stilted. She was amazed by how suddenly calm he'd become. Perhaps she had underestimated him and he would listen to her with his judgment unclouded after all. All night she had secretly imagined this forbidden confrontation, torturing herself with it after Vincent had condemned them all as heartless, leaving her alone in the garden with only bitter words as a reminder of his disapproval. She couldn't stand it. The revelation had come quickly then; Lucrecia had realised she would do whatever was required to keep the brown-eyed murderer from looking at her again with such cold disappointment. She couldn't bear the disapproval of a Turk.  


Oh, bright stars, they were all mad.  


"I think that Professor Gast would allow me to cancel the experiment before you would, love," she continued resolutely, moving towards the Jenova tank with strange determination. "That bothers me. It's been bothering me for months. I can see it in you when you look at me and then when you look at the frozen ... cadaver... in this tank. You look at us the same way. It's unnerving. I don't like it. I'm human. This thing is a monster. Quite a difference, dearest. I love you, you see. This Jenova monstrosity does not."  


"What are you talking about?" Hojo demanded, laughing in the back of his throat, "You are tired, aren't you, 'Crecia. It's left you hysterical. But you're nervous about the labor and that is perfectly understandable."  


"I will not allow you of all people to stand here in the glow of this monster's fish tank and psychoanalyze me," stated Lucrecia imperially. She was in front of it now, her green eyes flicking from Jenova's drowsing visage to her husband's rapidly altering expression. He looked conflicted. Better than outright rage or sadism, she supposed. "I'm not nervous. I believe, merely, that my morals are starting to affect me. I've been talking with people--"  


"People!" Hojo exploded, rushing towards her as though to strike. As he drew closer she saw how his analytical eyes were rimmed with red and his high cheekbones splotched with passion. He spasmed to a halt just short of her and screamed in her face. "People?! Like whom? Like that quiet little garden snake Vincent Valentine? I'm glad to know you've been consulting professionals!"  


"N-no," Lucrecia replied timidly, shaking her head, "No, just the other assistants and Professor Gast himself. I--"  


"Don't lie to me, 'Crecia. You demean my intelligence. What did the Turk prick tell you? Did he say that you cannot steal the future of an innocent fetus? You must not toy with nature? Bullshit culled from the cheap placards and picket signs of dormitory protestors. You're a scientist, Lucrecia Hojo, at the top of your field. Act like it. And remember, dear heart, that it takes two people to make a fetus. Eight months ago you had absolutely no qualms about this Project. Do you remember that? Eight months ago, you came to me."  


"Eight months ago I was deluded. I still thought you loved me, I suppose, only that you had forgotten it in your fervour. I imagined I should try and help you in your research. I thought you would pay attention to me again if I was somehow involved with the Jenova specimen."  


Hojo grimaced at the words, too many lines showing up on his face. He reached for her nearly before he could stop himself. But he did stop himself, smashing his emotions deep into his belly as Jenova's chemical-obscured face watched him reproachfully from behind the glass tube. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked away from them both. "I do love you," he protested half-heartedly, "But you don't understand. This is... this is the only way, 'Crecia."  


"Perhaps it is for you and that's fine. Who am I to pass judgment on your ambition? But this isn't for me anymore. It's different now than it was five months ago. Don't you see that I deserve more than to be only some tool of yours and your monster's? You've forgotten who I am in your mad rush to make a murderer for President Shinra and secure your name in Midgar. I'm Lucrecia Hojo, yes, and do you see this?" She held her wedding band in front of his nose and twisted her hand to make the lab lights dance on the gold, "You gave this to me as a symbol of our partnership. Half of you and half of everything you do belongs to me. You can't take that back. You can't abandon me for Jenova now, do you hear me?"  


After the words, a horrible stillness descended on the library, a silence so heavy that Lucrecia could feel it pressing against her skin and wedging into her eyes. Suspended in that quiet as Jenova was suspended in her cloudy solution, Hojo's drawn, white face burned and his dark eyes were glittering with questions. But Lucrecia had no more answers for him. No more hints. Her expression was cool.  


How am I pulling this off? she wondered, stepping backwards with tiny, trembling footsteps. How am I saying these things, doing these things, revealing these things to him after merely nodding my head for so long and letting him have his way?  


Vincent.  


If he could be strong and self-righteous, she could be too. Vincent. She'd say that name like a prayer until fate started to listen.  


Lucrecia raised her right hand and laid it to the cool glass of Jenova' s tank. She tapped it slightly with her fingernails and deep, sonorous sounds pervaded the basement Library like rapid little heartbeats.  


"Get your hands off of that."  


Hojo's voice was a murderous hiss, but Lucrecia ignored the order. She turned to face him, her hand still on the tank, and watched him sadly. "Why?" she asked simply, "Why? Is she more important than me now? When did this happen? And where was I when it did?"  


"Don't be ridiculous," Hojo snapped, darting forward to stand over her. The calm clouds had parted and there was a green-bellied storm behind them. His face had contorted with stifled rage and his bony fists clenched at his side so that small lines of blood dripped from his palms where his fingernails had pierced his skin. The anger made him look huge and black and Lucrecia wanted to run away. "She's just an experiment," he snarled, "The remnant of a dead civilization. She means nothing to me beyond the very real possibility of professional success. Did I marry Jenova? No, I married you. You're both my responsibilities, yes, but in different ways. Are you so besotted with Vincent Valentine that you can't understand the difference between our personal relationship and what we do down here?"  


"Oh, so you're responsible for me," Lucrecia laughed hollowly, "I don't need that. I don't need a doctor to take my temperature and check my pulse. I need a husband! Where did he go? What has this creature done with him?"  


"You're hysterical," Hojo sighed in exasperation, turning to pace the length of the small library, "And you understand nothing."  


"I understand enough. I understand that Jenova has become more important than me. What am I now but another part of this labyrinthine experiment you've concocted to prove her viability and your genius? I've become an incubator for another monster and you're the monster's father--"  


"Not a monster," Hojo corrected with a shake of his black head.  


"Monster enough, if he's a son of yours."  


The words were cruel and she regretted them as soon as her mouth clapped audibly shut. She could see Hojo reel away, struck, and Lucrecia wanted to wrap her arms around him as he bowed his head, his unkempt forelock sweeping over his brow and obscuring his face. "I... I'm sorry," she whispered, touching a hand to his cheek and coaxing his eyes from the floor. "I didn't mean that. See what this is doing to me? The awful things it makes me say? For seven months we've slaved - you, Professor Gast, the assistants and I - we've been killing ourselves for this thing! We're losing each other in all this. And you... my darling, you're losing something even more important than a friend or a wife, though I couldn't put a name to it. It's as if... as if you're becoming someone I don't know. Ideas race through your mind that I cannot and do not want to understand. Why do you feel you have to prove yourself to the world? You don't have to outdo everyone. You don't have to impress Professor Gast if it means sacrificing your sanity or your health... or me. Baby, no one cares. No one laughs like you think they do. All of the competition's in your poor head. The deadlines are all imagined. The importance of the Project has been all... all disproportionately inflated. Please, it isn't necessary to lose yourself or me over this. Over this!"  


Again she put her hands on the cold glass of the Jenova tank. It nearly didn't feel cold at all, though. Electric jolts of hot interest crackled like static over the glass. They ennervated Lucrecia's fingers. Hojo looked ennervated too. The skin of his lean face looked too loose and old, as though he could tear it off himself and hand it to her. His gaze sunk to the floor again but she could sense the weary struggle. They were all weary.  


Lucrecia looked spitefully into the dark tank. Jenova... She wished they'd never dug the bitch out of the ice. It had shocked the scientific community into a frenetic panic of speculation, but it had only brought heartache into her small sphere of existence. A year ago, yes, their toils had finally bore fruit as Gast's three decades of study led them at last to an almost perfectly preserved Ancient; a fossil but moreso, more amazingly amazing than a mere fossil. The creature was alive. It slumbered still in its death-like sleep but it was alive and breathing and living and watching. Lucrecia could feel it watching even now, watching her and Hojo and the rest with a peaceful patience beyond mortal comprehension. She felt suddenly drawn to the monster. The tug of a power that transcended time tore through her hand on the glass, shooting up her arm like heroin. Power... Jenova throbbed with a power she couldn't describe. And it was doing things, even in its dormancy, to Lucrecia and all of those she cared for.  


"I don't like it," she remarked suddenly, causing Hojo to watch her in numb surprise.  


"You never minded before," he said softly, "The idea of making a creature with the strength of those beings of old intrigued you so short a while ago. Remember? We would use her power to combat human diseases once we knew the human body would not reject it. Where did your enthusiasm go? Tired of the Project already? If only you had Jenova's patience..."  


"Don't speak of it as though it were alive," Lucrecia rebuked nervously, "Because it isn't really, no matter what the readings tell us."  


Hojo smiled to himself, folding his arms. The harsh lighting of the library played around him, the soft yellow fog of the electric lamps wreathing his hair in a golden nimbus. "You understand so little, dear heart. That hurts me somehow. I feel alone. But maybe it's better you don't understand. Naivete has a certain charm. Of course Jenova is alive. She cannot die. That is the genius of her. The solidarity of her cells sustains her indefinitely."  


"Cannot die? I don't believe it. All things die, especially things that have spent two-thousand years frozen to death beneath a glacier. I don't care what you say, what the equipment says... The cells may be technically thriving but there is no consciousness inside of it - no life! How can you think otherwise?"  


Hojo stepped forward without warning and roughly clamped his hand around Lucrecia's right wrist, flinging her arm from the tank. He about-faced so that he stood with the shimmering glass tube to his shoulders and his wife before him, her pretty mouth frozen half-open in wordless surprise. The Library throbbed expectantly. "I know she's alive because she tells me things," he said quickly, simply, "Dead things do not speak. I'm rational and I know that dead things do not speak. But Jenova speaks to me. I posit, therefore, that she is most definitely alive."  


"Let me help you," Lucrecia whispered, horrified, "Darling, darling, there's something wrong with you... C-come with me. Come away from this monster. It's doing things to you!"  


"I don't need you, 'Crecia," said the scientist, tilting his head. The lights caught his glasses and obscured his eyes. "I only need what's inside of you. After you give birth, you can divorce me, leave me, escape to paradise with your gentle murderer-- do as you like then. I know you haven't been happy for a long time. But I will not let you fuck up our work, our research! I-- I will not allow you to obliviate our pain just so that you can again have the approval of ignorant, posturing Vincent fucking Valentine!"  


"This has nothing to do with Vincent!" she gasped, carelessly and even flippantly admitting to the affair. Lies have benefitted no one! "I can't do this anymore, love, not even for you! I can't keep pretending I'm willing to treat this child like a variable in an experiment. He's not a variable, Professor Hojo! He's my poor child, damned from inception! Yours too you know! Your son!"  


"My specimen," Hojo corrected quietly.  


"Your son! And mine! Not Jenova's! It doesn't matter what you and Gast have injected us with. The cells mean nothing. The egg was mine and the sperm was yours. We are his parents. If you refuse to fulfill that role properly then I will take the responsibility entirely upon myself."  


"You lost your rights as a mother when you agreed to this, dearest heart. I'm sorry that I'm a clearer thinker and a braver soul than you. Now scuttle back to Valentine, little mouse, and tell him why you're allowing a human baby to be turned into a monster. Tell him why and see if the prince still cares for his soiled princess then."  


"Tell him why?" Lucrecia whispered, "No. You tell me why. I don't know what you mean."  


"What I meant is that you ought to tell him the truth. Let him know that you freely and eagerly participated in this Project with no coersion from myself or your Shinra employers. That is a contractual obligation, one from which you cannot deviate. You're as guilty as any of us, 'Crecia. Stop blaming me and Jenova."  


"I'll never accept a monster!" she screamed, throwing her fists to her sides. The library became a chaos of colour and shapes as her eyes clouded with tears. Hojo watched her contemptuously.  


"Jenova is hardly a monster," he said.  


Lucrecia shook her head, smiling grimly. "Too quick to assume, you smug bastard. You're the monster - and I reject you."  


Hojo appeared profoundly calm for an instant, his eyes narrowed in a carefully harnessed disdain. In a flash his right hand tensed, veins distended blue through pale skin, and he reared his arm back, bringing a fist slamming into Lucrecia's unprotected face. She cried out and stumbled backwards, knuckles imprinted along her jaw and blood on her lips. Hojo chased after her, stooping, and shoved her to the ground.  


"I can only bear so much," he said coldly as she worked to find her feet, the tears streaking her cheeks. "Give me the baby and then you're free. Then you're free and I won't care enough to stop you from leaving me and the company. I don't want to work with you any longer, dear heart. Your professional ethics are questionable and, quite frankly, you've failed to live up to my expectations--"  
"And you haven't lived up to m-mine!"  


Hojo smirked and Lucrecia noticed with a bit of a start that his hands were trembling. "Touché," he replied, "Both of us walk away disappointed."  


Lucrecia crabwalked to the door and out of Hojo's shadow, standing with some difficulty by sliding her shoulders up the wall. He made no move to help her. He had turned away, putting his back to her as he trembled, clasping his elbows. Lucrecia didn't know how to interpret that. Did he regret striking her or was he furious? Part of her wanted to run to him and protect him from others and from himself as she always had. But another part craved Vincent, desiring to be protected, loved, and sheltered. From what though? The results of her own egotism? Her own foolish unvaulted ambition? Her own desperation to win again her errant husband's wandering affection? Hojo hadn't lied. She'd willingly agreed to participate in the Project. She'd convinced herself that she wanted a super-Soldier too; a way to become Somebody overnight and escape Gast's long shadow.  


That dream - whether it had been real or merely the result of trying to relate to Hojo again - had died. The desperate old fire didn't matter when she thought of Vincent. He was her only aspiration now... but Lucrecia knew he would never suffer a monster.  


"You won't get this baby," she warned Hojo, leaning in the open doorway and wishing she could flee the mansion that instant. "It doesn't matter what I have to do. I'll slit my own throat before I let you have him. This is wrong. I'm disappointed to have realised it before you, but I don't think it's too late. We have to stop. Gast will allow it, if I speak to him. He'll allow it if you only back me up."  


"That won't happen and you know it."  


"Then I'll find a way. You'll see how I find a way, love." 

________________________________________  


With slits for eyes, Hojo watched Lucrecia depart, his shaking arms crossed over his chest like bandoliers. They flinched with every drumbeat of his heart. He thought he was having a stroke.  


"I hit her," he laughed aloud, not believing it. A quivering hand cupped his forehead. His fingertips gouged into his greasy hairline but the dull pressure was far away. "How? Oh, she made me so angry! That's her spell. Oh, why... Oh, why?"  


Because she didn't understand.  


The rest of the world couldn't comprehend the scope of his ambition but that was to be expected when a great man had been born into a small reality. What made no sense, however, was Lucrecia's sudden and astounding lack of comprehension. When the rest of Shinra scratched their heads or mocked his seemingly senseless hypotheses, she smiled in eager understanding, fathoming his desires with limitless insight. Why not now? The loneliness came upon him suddenly and mercilessly, sinking black claws into his chest. He felt so unbearably alone, stranded in an inaccessible land; alone with only the desire that never left him - to outrace the sun, to outdo all who'd come before him, and to make his name, at least, immutable and immortal in the annals of history. If he succeeded, perhaps he could find another partner in his travels but could there ever be another Lucrecia? Sometimes he thought he kept sane solely for her. "Lucrecia," he whispered, "My anchor and my reason. The sky will be a bit darker without you, dear heart."  


She was so indescribeably beautiful. How had someone so beautiful ever come to love him? He was short and scrawny with a funny build and narrow shoulders. His skin was sallow and his eyes were small; his lips compressed and sour. There was an elegance in his gestures, perhaps, and when he was inspired he could weave his words into a rope of poetry, suspending whomever he wished well above the terrestrial world, helplessly enthralled. But what did any of that mean. He was ugly. It was no mystery why she was drifting away now to show someone else how the world could be gorgeous and they could be gorgeous with it. Vincent Valentine. Gorgeous. Dark haired, dark eyed, tall and athletic with a cherub's mouth and a bleeding heart.  


"I still need her," he whispered, afraid, "She's the only window onto reality that I care for. How could I shatter that window?" It all would slip away now and there'd be nothing to keep him from slipping away with it.  


"Traitor," he decided half-heartedly, "Impatient as always, 'Crecia. Impatient." If she'd only waited for this baby to be born; waited for the passion to leave him so he could focus on her again; waited for the completion of the Project; waited for Shinra to get off their backs about results; waited for the day when they'd both be recognized and their son would be a god among men. Didn't she realize that triumph would only come after patience?  


"Patience," he slurred feverishly, his voice raspy and loud in the empty room. He paced the library, teeth grinding. "You're patient, aren't you?" he asked quiet Jenova. The mishapen figure looked out with living eyes that saw nothing. They'd proven that these past weeks. Lucrecia was only afraid of what the discovery meant. "Two thousand years buried beneath the ice and you're still patient. What a marvel you are; quiet, accomodating, submissive but powerful. Perhaps I should have married you."  


He laughed to himself, turning from the tank and jabbing his hands in his lab coat pockets. "If not a wife to me, than a mother to my son," he whispered, "Lucrecia is too beautiful to really be mother to the thing we are creating. But you're hideous enough, my darling, and so he shall be part of you. You're his mother... and I pray he will inherit your endless, silent patience. What are your unspoken aspirations, Jenova?" He approached her again, laying his pale hand against the glass and peering through the murky chemicals with bright eyes. "Tell me, please." The bubbles raced over her like insects. He wondered if they tickled as they passed over her nipples. "Sometimes I ponder it, humbly. But it's only me looking for poetry again."  


What had they pulled from the ice? An Ancient truly? Had they all looked like this? These perfectly sculpted, almost antiquitous features? Ifalna had looked nothing like Jenova. She was beautiful too but in a human way, lacking this quiet creature's majesty. It made very little logical sense and that troubled him.  


"I'm starting not to care for humans very much," he admitted in a whisper, pressing a fist to his lips. His wedding ring glared at him, a gleaming golden frown, and he turned his hand to be blinded to it. Lucrecia had changed, not him. She had become an impatient, selfish bitch. Everyone had seen her in the garden with Valentine. They all knew. The entire staff was laughing at the ugly cuckold as his beautiful wife snuck off in the dark with a Turk from Wutai!  


On a pink-lit stage he saw them together, Columbine and Lelio, conspirators laughing at his lonely eccentricity just as everyone had always laughed. Everyone but Lucrecia! "She was always the exception!" He collapsed against the tank, his head in his hands. "What is she now? She's betrayed my trust! She's made an idiot of me... and there's nothing I can do. I have to keep working with her. I have to. But she's made up her mind, I know it - she'll never give up that baby. I know my 'Crecia and she's dug in her heels."  


Hojo sighed so that he shuddered, rubbing at his eyes and temples. This was all the fucking Turk's fault. He'd pay somehow - with his job, his reputation, his wallet... his right hand... his life...  


There was a trembling against his back; a deep rumbling from the ponderous tank. Hojo turned quickly about, breath catching in his throat. Was the pump failing? Had the techs neglected to regulate the filters today and caused a chemical imbalance within this toxic soup that house their precious prize? Was there a flaw in the elaborate support system that kept the specimen suspended--? But no; he saw Jenova was precisely as she'd been when last he'd sounded these wavering depths with his tired black eyes. Her purple features were placid, frozen, and dead - dead but alive. She had the endless patience of a slumbering corpse.  


"Patient, patient, patient," he complimented her dreamily, "If only the rest of the world trusted me as you do." 

________________________________________  


"Did he do that to you?!"  


Lucrecia sobbed soundlessly, hot, painful breaths misting her fists. She tried to get away from Vincent's piercing brown eyes for they saw into her very heart and discerned all the blackened bitterness there; the corrupt things were frightened by the intrusion, skittering into the light like cockroaches. Oh, she disgusted herself! But Vincent would not let her go. He clamped a strong hand over either shoulder and wrenched her around to him.  


"You answer me, Lucrecia! This has gone on long enough! I will not stand by while he beats you!"  


"N-no, no, Vincent, you don't understand! He was just upset," she stammered, "He's always had a terrible temper and I pushed him too far this time."  


"How can you say that?" he pleaded, his fingers digging into her arms. He tossed his head irritably, throwing hair from his eyes. "Defend him? You come to me bleeding and then you defend him? For whom do you care most, Lucrecia? I need an answer."  


"Don't make me," she choked, falling into his chest and crushing the pressed collar of his suit jacket in her fists. She leaned into him as though dying, wishing she could forever sink into him like a dream, to escape the disapproval blaring from his eyes but to be able to enjoy the comfort of his warmth and his strong arms. Vincent abandoned his anger and let her cry, wrapping himself around her and lowering his lips to her hair. His expression was inscrutable. He longed to indulge himself by loving her unconditionally, whispering of impossible alternatives to this hellish situation, but all that came to him were rebukes. Did she understand now? he wanted to ask. Did she understand now how hopelessly insane Hojo had become and how reprehensible this "Jenova Project" truly was? Shinra's experiment was destroying her body. What Hojo regarded as unfortunate side effects, Vincent saw as sacrilige; the desecration of a temple to which he had too late been converted. How could he do that to her? How could she let him?  


How could I let him?  


The rebukes weren't voiced. Vincent was a slave to her tears. Perhaps this meant she didn't need his too-little, too-late reprimands. As horrible as they were, Hojo's actions tonight had finally impressed upon her the depth of his depravity. So maybe it was finally the right time.  


"'Crecia," he began softly, his breaths tickling the fine hairs around her ears, "There isn't a lot you can do to make me stop loving you. Do you want this now? It wants to be yours. I want to be yours."  


Her throat burning and her vision hazed, she looked to him and saw he had that velvet box in his hand again. The simple circle of gold glittered in the electric light, a small star pointing out the way home. Perhaps Hojo wouldn't have any of them...  


"We'll leave," Vincent whispered as she drew the box from his fingers, "I'll give my resignation and we'll go south. There are mining camps there. We'll settle somewhere. It won't be much but we can save for a while and go overseas. Does it matter where so long as you're with me and Hojo can't hurt you? He can't get through me."  


"No one gets through Vincent Valentine... right?" She smiled weakly. Vincent chuckled, a masculine, rumbling sound that sent warm jolts down her back.  


"You have it, lady scientist. What else can I promise you? Happiness. And I promise you safety. I promise your son the father he deserves. I promise a second chance for both of us, and a fair start for the baby. Marry me, Lucrecia. I can get you the hell out of this. Say yes."  


She took her cheek away from the beating of his heart and tilted her head back, seeing herself reflected in his eyes. Vincent had the biggest eyes, soft and chocolate-coloured, framed by lashes almost shamefully long on a man. Lucrecia liked them. She smiled and stroked his cheek, blinking tears away so that his features came into sharp focus. "You do make it all seem possible," she admitted, straightening his collar and smoothing his jacket where her tears had left dark blotches in the blue material. "That is the magic, you realise. He used to put his arms around me and whisper miracles in my ear too."  


Vincent rolled his shoulders uneasily. "Hojo lied to you." She nodded noncommittally, running her nails down his tie in an absent caress. "I'm sorry that I... that I said no last night, Vincent. I didn't know what I wanted, not really." The baby was kicking her helpfully, refocusing her thoughts. "Even now, I don't like the thought of leaving him unprotected from himself. He's falling apart and I don't understand why. He's a genius, Vincent. I know you don't think very much of him, but believe me when I tell you he is a genius. I admire him and I love him, even if he has come to hate me. But you've helped me realise that I have two other lives I need to concern myself with. I know I can make you happy, and I know I can be a proper mother. But I-- I don't know that I can ever save my husband... Vincent, can you forgive me? I... I know it's probably too late now but... because, now... I- I want to tell you yes with all my heart. Take me away and take my baby away too. Save us."  


"I won't let him hurt either of you anymore," Vincent swore. Lucrecia felt his shoulders tense beneath her hands. He held her tighter and made his vow. "I don't care what happens or what he tries, I'll always be standing between him and you."  


"That would be nice," she sighed, touching him, afraid he'd vanish like a holograph, "To be protected a while, like the princess he thinks I am. Perhaps he's right to accuse me now... I don't know. You won't ever change, will you? Please always be just as you are, Vincent, because you're perfect this way, almost frightfully, teasingly perfect, and I'm so afraid of it. Entropy eats away at us. We decay. We alter. We die. That's the way of the world, but surely there's some hope when two people... p-pool their resources and give a damn."  


"You and your nonsensical pessimism," he scolded gently, treating her to another of his marvellous, deep-chested chuckles, "I'm here and I'm not going anywhere without you."  


"Yes." With some difficulty, Lucrecia parted them, her palms still pressed flat against his shirtfront. He wiped the rest of the tears away, leaving her cheeks raw and aglow. She twisted her lips to him gratefully. The sudden smile effused her entire countenance and Vincent felt suddenly giddy. He had done this. "Yes, we'll leave tonight, you and I. I'll go into the village and hire a driver, a truck. We'll get out of here and never look back."  


"Sounds like a plan," he whispered, amused by her new enthusiasm, "Go get ready. There isn't time to lose. Bring your ugly hat with the wax cherries on it so I can make fun of you on the way."  
Lucrecia laughed and stood on tiptoe to brush a kiss across his lips. "I could fly now, Vincent. Imagine dumpy, pregnant me cutting a trail through the clouds, frightening birds with my wax cherry hat. How did you do that?" He had conquered every wrong in the world by forcing a decision out of her. "You're a magician," she whispered, stepping quickly towards the stairwell and making a great show of replacing Hojo's ring with his. The thin band of gold shimmered, its single ruby sparkling like one red eye. But she was hesitant to leave the room all the same, afraid to break the spell. Would she lose her confidence outside of this room? No. No!  


"What is it?" he asked quietly as she hovered, tears brimming.  


"I'm afraid to leave you," she answered, laughing helplessly at herself. Something ate at her heart as she fixed her tear-bright eyes on his, as though to memorize their colour and engrave the soft contour of his countenance in her mind.. She wanted to stand here until time ended, watching his hair tremble in the cold breeze from the vent. Suddenly it seemed things could never be like this again, that these brief moments of momentous decision were the denouement in a drama that couldn't possibly endure. Her hands shook, fluttering over eachother. She twisted the ring back and forth, wearing a groove in her knuckle.  


"Don't leave, Vincent," she begged, "Please please don't leave or change. I'll be back by morning, very soon, and we'll both be gone well before the sun rises."  


"Understand me when I say everything is all right now," he demanded, "He won't have you, Lucrecia! I'm taking care of you now."  


She smiled crookedly as the baby kicked again, communicating its anxiety in some prenatal morsecode. Mummy has gone weak with relief, sweet baby, please don't hurt her.  


Yet here was the nightly pain, lashing her spine and thighs with firebrands. "I love you so much," Lucrecia murmered before forcing herself from the room. Vincent nodded humbly, as though complimented.  


"Love's an empty word," he said to the room. Completed, he could never be half a man again. He would rather be dead, now, than ever sundered as he'd been. "That's obsession," he laughed to himself weakly, "Not love. Fuck me. If someone is worth loving, they're worth obsessing over." And the funniest thing of all this was how blind he'd been to his own state of incompletion. But did anyone ever see themselves save in a mirror? People walked about ignorant of their own holes, not feeling them until they'd been filled.  


Vincent stood, taking deep, centering breaths. The sound of his own heartbeat hammered in his ears like a giant bashing on his skull, or his thoughts lashing out from behind his eyes like mad moths trapped in a light fixture. He was dizzy with headache. His rage felt like a virus. His face was hot and prickling, as though he'd spent a few long minutes staring into a fireplace. His fingertips were numb. His mouth was uncomfortably dry.  


He was thirsty for blood.  


Normally he killed things when he was this pissed. Normally he fucking killed whatever it was that had offended his intolerant sensibilities - but this situation was different. This situation had to be disarmed like a bomb. It was a perfect conundrum for a Shinra Turk accustomed to operating delicately, finesse and skill his watchwords.  


Vincent licked his lips. "Ho... jo."  


The two evil syllables tasted like shit in his mouth. His hands clenched into fists. His eyes felt like hot little marbles in his skull. He stalked to the end of the hallway and pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the dusty cold window there. Outside, Lucrecia was surreptitiously departing the mansion's grounds and heading into Nibelheim - ah, there, he could see her hobbling off far below, a collection of thin limbs carefully balancing her bulbous belly. The winds were picking up and they roared about her, nearly fouling her legs in her dress. Vincent heard them screaming in the eaves of the already rotting old mansion, fat with ghosts. A thousand voices in that wind and none of them sounded friendly. They bore a storm. The Turk could see it in the distance - stacks of blacks and greys and poisonous greens crawling sluggishly across the night sky. They overcrowed the yellow moon like army ants covering a corpse. A few hot spatters struck the window and Vincent stepped back, lightening flickering like a broken lantern. Perfect time for a storm, he thought bitterly. Perfect.  


Maybe Hojo was in league with a devil. Maybe he was a devil, downstairs even now doing a rain dance around his bottled horror.  


Vincent jammed his fists in his pockets and returned to the doorway from which Lucrecia had fled. Thunder shook the walls, rattling keys on their hooks and shaking the panes in the windows. His heart pounded in his ears and golden dust motes spiraled around the tall Turk's shoulders as though he were kicking up a little storm of his own in the abandoned, lightning-lashed hallway.  


Down there laughing now? he wondered, leaning against the doorjamb. The stone wall concealing the Library passage caught a sizzle of light and shimmered, almost an invitation. Downstairs scheming, playing with lives, kowtowing to dead bitches in giant beakers... wondering how he'll hurt her next. And all the while, Lucrecia silently humoured him and hoped, Gast encouraged it, and the assistants scraped and simpered or helplessly catered to his mad desires. Vincent, Jimmy, and their boss had merely done their damnedest to avoid the entire debacle, pretending they didn't know why one of the staff was so very pregnant.  


"I've passed him a thousand times and kept my eyes fixed ahead," Vincent rasped, pressing the heel of his hand into his forehead, "I should have challenged him. It's sickening. I should have told him it was sickening."  


"Vincent... Vincent, don't."  


Jimmy approached quickly from behind, vacillating between raging and begging so his voice came out choked . Vincent was startled to find himself in the bedroom, the Library passage wrenched open and one foot on the stygian staircase. "Don't," Jimmy said again, almost pleading now, "I heard you and Lucrecia. I know it's not my business. I mean, it is, but Lucrecia still has clearance to leave the grounds and it's not a break in ordinance if I let the two of you take off together, but..."  


"What a pal."  


"Shut up. Just leave Hojo alone. You won't accomplish anything by going down there. Just take what the two of you will need and get the fuck out of town."  


Vincent shook his head slowly and turned away.  


"Advice is noted. Concern is appreciated. Protocol's all in order. Take care of yourself, Jimmy, by staying up here. I have business to attend to in the Library. It's a responsibility I've ignored for her sake and mine, but damn excuses. We should be ashamed of ourselves."  


Before he could second guess it or let his temper cool, Vincent framed himself in the melodrama of the black, library passage. Cold, dry air blew up his nostrils, tingling the inside of his nose with dust. He didn't like going downstairs. The smell bothered him. But how could Lucrecia ever rest easy - no matter where they ran - if her estranged husband continued to breathe? He had made her bleed! He had struck her - a pregnant woman, he had struck her in the face!  


Vincent would break his jaw! He'd snap his arm off and throw it into that monster's tank! Oh, hell yes; he'd leave Professor Hojo something to remember them by.  


"Not that I'm concerned," Vincent murmured coldly, moving down the staircase, "But if anyone asks, you didn't see me come down here, Jimmy. And you don't know anything about where Lucrecia and I have disappeared to after tonight. Do something decent for once in your life."  


A crack of lightning and then thunder, like a dragon clearing its throat. Jimmy bristled, cold shuddering down the small of his back and freezing his fingertips. The sky had blackened with storm. Even the ugly moon was hiding. He had to find their boss. He watched Vincent's descent until his friend's unruly head of dark hair had disappeared into the gloom and then he fled for the staircase, fumbling for his phone. 

________________________________________  


"Is this the way it must be then? I have to go it alone? What a coward I've become."  
Jenova didn't answer him. Hojo wasn't surprised. Really, if he tilted his head a certain way she was only a curiously human-shaped glob of frozen tissue, remarkable for her cellular structure and her empowering effect on human DNA. How could it agree or disagree with any opinion he decided to form about himself? It shamed him to wish she could. How sweet it would be if he could rest a hand against this cold pane and by doing so invigourate the frozen face all aslumber behind the chemicals. It would blossom into life and regard him with a warm, living, woman's face, glowing with compassion. Instead he heard his whining reach the ceiling and bounce back unanswered and unheard. The library was cold. All the words on the shelves and in the cabinets were hollow. For just a moment, Hojo forgot why he was doing this. How had he become so bound and determined to strive in Shinra's name despite any and all compunction, forsaking even Lucrecia for the needs of the company's project? Hojo was horrified to realise how he'd sickened her, hurt her, and pushed her away. Hadn't he been paying attention as all of this transpired? Was he a victim as well?  


Gast managed it. Every decision he made was delivered with an air of confident finality.  


"I'll never be Gast," Hojo sighed to himself, resting his forehead on the tank again. He frowned behind a curtain of hair, rubbing fingers into his stinging eyes. Wonderful. She'd made him cry. Lucrecia didn't love him anymore so here he would sit and sob in the dark, alone, angsting, desolate.  


He smeared the saline onto the glass and miserably examined it. Had Jenova wept in her loneliness as the ice settled around her? Lilac angel lost her way in the snow, staring at stars through the frosted prison bars but frozen terrestrial, anchored to the earth. Ah, Hojo. Caught up in the poetry again. That was why you would never be like Gast.  


If only she'd stayed, he thought forlornly, admiring the prismatic effects his tears had on the glass. If only Vincent Valentine hadn't corrupted her with the phantoms of his self-styled morality. Where did he get his morals? What made Lucrecia, or the fetus, any more important than the men and women he had killed under President Shinra's orders? That's a dangerous line, Valentine. It was a touchy-feely, kneejerk absence of sense and overindulgence of sentiment that he prescriped to, vaguely delineated and postively meaningless - but oh so potent. With it, he'd sucked the marrow from their happiness like some bloodthirsty vampire, descending dark and quiet as the midnight sky, snatching her from his arms, stealing her heart away.  


"You thieving, ignorant leech," he snarled, laughing helplessly in his anger and smashing his greasy head again and again in the glass, "Why do you deserve her? How have you earned her?"  


Every muscle was hard and his joints felt arthritic with mad rage. The Turk was in him like a sickness! Here, in this mansion, he was a plague! How Hojo had despised him, ever since that first glimpse in Shinra's office. Vincent was handsome and he knew it. His eyes were dark and deeply-set in his pale head, perfect strangers to his emotions, and he used them to lie. He was quiet always, a patient schemer. Worst of all of it, he judged everyone he met with an immediate, impeccable finality. In the office he had taken one look at Gast's bespectacled, slit-eyed, and sallow-complexioned assistant, and he had begun to radiate reproach. No one respected Hojo much less liked him, but Vincent Valentine was a giant among his coworkers, respected for his mental legerity, his thoroughness, his hawk eye, and his devotion to his job. The rest of them - the techs, the other Turks, even Lucrecia - they had been duped by this vicious man to hate Hojo too. No one, then, respected him. Everyone respected Valentine. Did Lucrecia have to love him too?!  


Why?! Why had she changed?! Why had she abandoned him for an insignificant moron with a gun and lying eyes? How could she love someone so meaningless? Yet love it was - and Hojo burned with jealousy.  


Footsteps. From down the corridor, he discerned the sudden tentative tickle of footsteps upon the hazardous and odiforous spiral staircase descending from the second floor. They were far too heavy to be 'Crecia's careful steps. One of the assistants perhaps? The hour had grown so late though, and the techs were not known to work night shifts.  


Whoever it was, Hojo couldn't let anyone walk in here and catch him kneeling before the Jenova tank like a frightened child, tears in his eyes and glasses askew. They laughed at him enough. They didn't need any new punchlines. His lips murmuring senselessly over his lips as he rose, he absently cursed himself and moved to the spectral analyser, rifling through the wire basket at the base of it for the day's data on dear Jenova's metabolism. Perhaps he could lose himself in work for a while. Personal matters would drift away if he only concentrated on ideas bigger than himself.  


But I am still human, he thought bitterly. That's why this was so illogically painful.  


The footsteps were in the hall now, quickly nearing. Too quickly. Someone was angry. Someone was pissed. A sudden peal of thunder rattled the walls, vibrating beakers in their trays and rattling a spoon in an abandoned coffee mug. The idea of a storm struck Hojo distantly and he welcomed it. He felt a little placated to think that the weather was working to match his mood. Maybe somebody was paying attention afterall...  


Thunder burst rapidly like gunfire, one explosion bleeding into the next until a sudden, stentorian blast erupted overhead and rattled the lighting fixtures. Furiously the storm pounded fists against the ceiling, ripping across the sterile walls until finally it found purchase and threw open the library door! It connected with the opposite wall with a dull crash, splintering it up the middle.  


"Hojo!"  


The scientist was shaking. He reached to steady the swinging light, blinking holes out of his vision and asking himself, in a brief moment of ignorance, who it was in the mansion that might dare address him so informally. They could laugh as they would behind his back but by hell, he'd be acknowledged respectfully to his face or he would have the impudent fucker's job. He turned, sneering, into a swinging fist. It connected solidly with his head and scattered his self-righteousness neatly. Down into a heap of bones and labcoat he went, bells joining the merry roar of thunder.  


"Where I grew up, men don't hit women," Vincent snarled, stooping over him murderously, "Is that how you get your rocks off, Professor? You bully pregnant women around? Surprise! I'm not going to tolerate it!"  


On the floor...? How'd he get here? The tiles were gritty. Someone hadn't swept up tonight. Sand crunched under his palm as he pushed himself up into a sprawl and smeared blood from his mouth. Upon looking up into a light that seemed suddenly too bright, Hojo saw Valentine standing over him, a dark figment leapt from his very own self-indulgent raving. He looked dangerously indignant. There were bits of cobwebs, mildew, and rotten wood on the toes of his standard issue shiny black shoes. Why had President Shinra built them a mansion on top of a crypt? This simply was not civilized.  


"Blew in... with the storm, I see. That too is suiting, yes. You've always been as bleak, as inauspicious, as unwanted as the rain." Hojo sputtered something vile and feebly struggled to stand. He'd not been socked in the face since medical school. He wondered if anything was broken. "I'll have your job for this, Valentine."  


Vincent kicked him savagely with those scuffed shoes, a rain of sharp-toed kicks that started fires in Hojo's thin chest. He wrapped his arms protectively about himself but the Turk relented soon enough, his fists white and spasming twitchily every few seconds towards the open front of his blue suit jacket and the gun doubtlessly holstered inside.  


"There's nothing you can take," Vincent related smugly. It felt good to lay it out. Better to lay Hojo out. "You think I'd trade my career in for you? Hell no. I'm finished already with the Turks. That's how a real man operates, Hojo. He doesn't place more value on his career than on his lover. She comes first, should he have to beggar himself, she comes first. That's compassion, Hojo. Love, Hojo. That's how it's done, Hojo."  


"Ah, so you are fucking the little bitch," the scientist laughed, on his feet now and leaning against Jenova's rumbling tank. The room wouldn't stop spinning. Blood was running off his jaw and tickling him somewhere about the throat. "I'd suspected it, yes, but I wasn't sure. So unseemly, that. So common, even for you. But she's good, eh? You couldn't help yourself."  


Vincent leapt for him like a cat, batting Hojo's arms aside expertly and smashing him into the tank with a devastating right hook. A blue knee shot into his stomach then and an elbow vectored into the base of his skull. The Turk moved like a machine-- no, like a doctor. Hojo thought he moved like a doctor, plying his trade on the human body quickly, accurately, effectively. His victim grunted and hacked up a hot splash of bile, impressed.  


"Why so upset?" the scientist insisted once he was crumpled on the wet tiles and spitting blood. "Sh-she loves you. Be proud of yourself! You won your prize. The two of you can have each other, and there's certainly not a damned th-thing... thing I can do, is there? Truest love is... absolute. Immutable. Nothing I do can lessen it. Lucrecia--"  


"Don't say her name!" Vincent roared, raising his right fist again. When Hojo said her name it sounded dirty; heavy with sin and sex. In three syllables he could imply things that had nothing to do with the reality of their relationship, and yet Vincent could feel the insinuations creeping into his brain, trying to take root. They were more effective by far than Jimmy's flustered, clumsy arguments. How did Hojo manage that when he himself was no fit judge on what constituted pure affection? How did he so thoroughly demean the love between himself and Lucrecia just by looking at him? Monster!  


Hojo cackled, tilting his ear to the distant thunder.  


"She's my wife," he reminded.  


"Not anymore," replied the Turk grimly, "She's leaving you. It's settled now. She's born all she could of your receding sanity and swollen sense of self. Again and again, ad nauseam, as though she could will you to be that way again, she tells me what you used to be; an idealist ever looking around the corner and troping endlessly in anticipation of what you might one day find. Seems to me you've found it, Hojo, and it's ruined you. Experimenting on human beings... you've squandered your last chance. She's mine now. You've lost her."  


"Boo hoo."  


His head hurt. Hojo shoved himself off the tank, ignoring the brute on spread feet and bent knees. Vincent looked magnificent, even out of the corner of Hojo's squinted eye. Did he stand in front of a mirror a few hours a day to get this dramatic posturing down?  


"Sour grapes?" asked the Turk and the scientist shrugged, nursing his jaw. He smirked and Vincent wanted to peel it off him like a dirty plaster, slam him back to the ground, and grind his heels into his ribs. Hojo deserved the sort of beating they gave to child rapists in prison. That seemed... almost appropriate. He had, after all, raped and ruined his unborn son and exploited his own wife, robbing her of something indescribeable. Jimmy didn't get that. Gast sure as hell didn't understand it. Vincent felt like the last sane man left in the mansion - he probably was. "You need to be put down, hmm? Humbled, at the least--"  


"Why do you suppose she loves you so much?" Hojo asked the question without malice or mockery. Curiosity burned suddenly inside of him.  


Suspicious, Vincent tilted his head and regarded the bleeding scientist with a narrow eye, thin brow superciliously arched. His tie was crooked and he straightened it before answering. "You don't think I ask myself that question everyday? In all honesty, you sick fuck, I don't think it matters. I could have been anyone and she would have clung to me only to get away from you. Maybe I was only fortunate to be here at the same time she was finally ready to end the charade with you. It could have been anyone. I was just lucky."  


"You don't give yourself much credit," Hojo chuckled, pacing a few thoughtful, shaky steps away. "I can't figure you out. You're either naive - and you've killed too many men for that - or this is all some mask you wear to lower men's guards and turn the women your way. The selflessness is sickening. I don't think I buy it. Who knighted you, sadistic, murdering psychopath? No. No, I don't buy it at all. Drop it, Valentine. Blow a hole in my head, Turk. Please. Live up to your reputation."  


"What do you know of the Turks?" Vincent replied with a little snort of disdain, "Or me? Do not make up a personality for me, Hojo. Do not comfort yourself by thinking she fell in love with anything less than what I am."  


"And what are you? Ha... Pretty little bad boy with a heart of gold. You're what they all want and I'm what they settle for. Ah, but hell, who can blame them? If I swung that way, I'd fuck you too. But if I swung that way she'd like me more - I'd be sensitive... intuitive... complicated."  


Hojo fell into choking giggles and Vincent disgustedly shook his head. His right hand was close to his holster but he dare not allow his fingertips to brush the pistol. The temptation of cold steel would be too much. He wouldn't be able to stop himself from exercising a final solution. "You're insane," he pointed out instead, feeling his jaw jut petulantly and his lips curl away from his teeth, "You call me crazy but it's you. So rot in this crypt with your monster. You and Gast can bunk up with Jenova and see how far that gets the both of you. But she and I are leaving tonight. Let me... deliver her resignation in her stead. I am taking her from you. Do you understand? Out of this disgusting mansion and away from that monster."  


"You cannot escape Jenova, Valentine," Hojo said matter-of-fact, staring, "You never can. Haven't you been paying attention? Don't you know?"  


"Know what?"  


Hojo turned and smiled sadly. His gaze was full of tears. But crocodiles cried too. "I forget it myself sometimes. Professor Gast does not like to dwell on it either, but the... inner circle... cannot help but come to certain conclusions. We have access to all of the information. We see... the big picture. She'll be dead soon, Valentine." Hojo looked suddenly green.  
"What the hell are you talking about?"  


"Your princess," Hojo clarified flatly, "She will not survive the birth. She's weak. She's bleeding. The fetus is sucking the life out of her, aided by her own treacherous body and the Jenova cells. Jenova's cells are fiercely self-preservative. They feed on whatever they come in contact with; feed and subsume. The fetus has been made the host of these cells and the incubator - Lucrecia - she exists only to keep that fetus alive. She's a consumable commodity. She's going to die, Valentine."  


The silence was huge. Hojo could hear Vincent's wristwatch ticking. The Turk stared for an eternity, his pink lips parted, his brow twitching madly and his eyes trembling in his skull. The words were... lies. Only some cruel distraction. "It's not true," he decided softly, undergoing a swift and startling transformation. Suddenly he was a mask of careful porcelain, his eyes half-lidded and bruised, his mouth hard, his jaw at a harsh angle from his throat. A flicker there betrayed his racing pulse; a ticking shadow above his collar that twinkled like a pale star.  


"If it comforts you to be delusional, by all means be so!" Hojo barked scathingly, his tears remedied with a swipe of his coat sleeve, "But Professor Gast and I have studied her rate of decline and the dark possibility of it has become an all but inescapable inevitability. It is unquestionably sad, Valentine. Frightfully fucking unfair. Yet, I suppose one can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs."  


Hojo was astonished by his own nonchalance. He wanted to laugh. This felt so much better! Best to feel nothing at all - or to feel hateful and bitter - than to feel so fucking hurt. She deserved it, right? Impatient and unfaithful, she'd at least serve him and the baby one final time before efficient Jenova cancelled her from the equation. Let her leave the Project in a pine box if she wanted out of it so badly! And poor, poor Vincent Valentine. He could be alone too.  


The Turk was stumbling to the door, eyes boring into the uneven flooring, his lips tight and his mouth agape as though he couldn't breath. "I'm taking her away from you," he hissed, "Away from these... these lies. You won't touch her again!"  


"After the baby comes, you may do whatever you wish with her remains," said Hojo coldly, resting both fists on the reassuring solidity of his computer desk. "Bury them. Burn them. Scatter her ashes somewhere romantic. The garden perhaps? Or the mountain pass wherein the quidnuncs say the pair of you often remove your jackets and dare the cold for a quick tumble in the grass. Yes. Fertilize a tree with her. I don't think I care. But Lucrecia cannot leave until she has concluded her donation to the Project. Too much has been risked in the making of that creature in her womb; enormous amounts of gil, time, and resources have been expended for the sake of something neither of you understand nor appreciate. The success of this venture may not be jeopordized."  


"To hell with your garbage! To hell with you and Gast and Shinra! You can't use her up like some fucking animal! I won't allow it! We are leaving and you cannot stop us! Take your Jenova Project and shove it up your sick ass!"  


"She cannot leave."  


"Heh. If it comforts you to be delusional, by all means be so." Vincent smirked to himself, then swivelled on one heel and headed for the exit, more determined than ever. Hojo watched his retreating back with eyes clouded red from his worthless tears, his fingernails scratching absently at his desk. It was a loud, obnoxious sound, like something trying to get out of a cage. The Turk's retreating footsteps were louder; louder than the shouting thunder.  


'Crecia couldn't leave. She couldn't leave and take that baby. She couldn't leave him alone. She wouldn't leave if that dark, bullying prince of hers wasn't around to escort her. She wouldn't have the strength for it, or the conviction--  


Where was it? The pistol of which Professor Gast had spoken; the one to be used in the event a specimen became uncontrollable, or if there was a robbery or otherwise martial disturbance? Ah...  
"Vincent?" Hojo called hesitantly, taking a step after him. The fleeing Turk snapped roughly about, his face set like stone around an uncharacteristically ugly sneer. The very air of the room was starting to nauseate him; the formaldehyde, Hojo's bad cologne, the distant, wafting scent of raw meat. Or, perhaps, the nausea was a moiling mask over sudden, paralysing dread. He could feel it creeping.  


"I don't want to hear anymore. I've too much to do tonight to listen to the senseless futility of a madman. The... the storm makes more sense than you do."  


But Vincent paused anyway, pulling up sharp as though grabbed by the collar and hauled back. He pocketed his hands, shivering and sick. Something. Something was wrong. The dark hallway was like a mouth. He thought he saw bones between the walls and floor. Hojo's leering, eager eyes darted into his own like knives, their cloying sentimentality forgotten. The bubbling tank with its quiet prisoner, the boiling beakers, the blind computer monitors, the sheaves of scribbled read-outs; glass, burning white kaleidoscope reflections of faces making him dizzy. All of it crowded him claustophobically; the lurking hell full of misguided ambition and monsters leapt - everywhere were the monsters, hiding behind the walls of a beautiful manor secreted in the quiet of a nondescript village, crouching in the shadow of the mountains. It was all like something out of a bad movie and he suddenly couldn't understand how he'd gone from patrolling Midgar to battling a scientist and a mansion full of monsters. He was out of his element. This irredeemable villain - Hojo - he out-monstered all of them and the Turk could do nothing.  


"Oh, God," Vincent whispered.  


"Please humor me," the scientist insisted, taking another step forward. "Please tell me how much you love my Lucrecia. You won't tire of her in six months, will you? She's more than just this conquest... isn't she? You'll never leave her, even after the thrill is gone... will you? Will you be there for her always, be there like I couldn't be? I know the both of you exchanged promises to eachother - furtive oaths sworn beneath the stars - but did you mean them? What would you do for her, Vincent Valentine? Anything in the world?"  


The Jenova tank glittered in the darkness like an eye. Vincent glanced unwillingly at it, his mind racing. The creature's corpse-face watched him with a certain compasion as the bubbles frothed up either side of her jaw. She watched the two men imperiously, but lovingly. Vincent's forehead felt hot. What was she thinking? What did she know? He was only a hired gun, incapable of comprehending the supposed majesty and scientific significance of this curvy mannequin of alien cells. Why did she seem suddenly to look into his very heart and damn him as a pretender?  


Suddenly, Vincent wanted out of that laboratory more than he'd ever wanted anything else in his life. The walls were screaming at him to escape before they closed in. The monitors printed RUNRUNRUN across their square, glowing mouths. The machines buzzed in terror.  


But Turks didn't run. They assessed each situation, chose an appropriate weapon, and eliminated threats.  


Eyes narrowed to thin slits of black, Hojo continued his careful, studious approach, hands buried in his labcoat. He turned his drawn, sallow face to Vincent's. "Anything?" he demanded in a whisper, sad again. "Star-crossed love depresses me. Unrequited love makes a smashing paperback, but it's painful as hell when you're the one in the pages. It's sad, Valentine. Maybe the both of you deserved it. I know my 'Crecia certainly did. You didn't know her in school. You didn't see... how desperately she wanted to be wanted. But she cannot leave, Valentine. Not yet."  


Vincent looked terrified; a controlled, half-hidden terror that Hojo almost couldn't stand to watch. The Turk took a step backwards and shot his right hand inside the flap of his jacket. The scientist beat him to the draw. A gun was suddenly between them, the black steel barrel wavering in the Turk's face. It glinted in the flourescent light just like Jenova's tank - poisonous, patient, and powerful.  


Fat rain plummeted from above in sheets. The roar of it was pervasive, reaching even the basement laboratory in a deafening curtain of sound that played satisfied stacatto to the thunder's booming bass. Vincent held his breath.  


Hojo didn't. He sucked air so he could choke on a laugh. All of his frustration and hurt came out his throat in jerky, vomitous chortles. "You... you shouldn't have gotten involved, you miserable bastard. You've brought it on yourself! She cannot leave. I won't allow it. And you believe me, you waste of flesh, that I'm sorry to say you won't be leaving either. You think you can have her just because you want her? No doubt that's how life's worked for you. But your steady hand and your good looks can't get you everything. They don't mean shit down here, you contemptuous fuck."  


"What the hell is your problem?" Vincent growled, eyes on the gun. He thought he could smash Hojo's arm away if he could only distract him. It seemed a simple matter. Basic geometry. "You don't understand her or me."  


"Why don't you explain to me then?! Tell me the story of your life, Valentine! Wow me with the depths of your soul and make me into a believer!"  


Hojo laughed madly and jammed the pistol into the Turk's neck, the sweat beaded and dripping down his sunken cheeks like thick oil. Vincent stumbled back and hit the wall - brickwork, and a whiteboard cluttered with sticky notes. Some of the scraps came loose and fluttered to the ground. The cold barrel crushed his windpipe. He wouldn't die here. Lucrecia needed him to be there when she came with the truck and driver. How could he keep his promise if Hojo shot him? There'd be a mess and Gast would come. There'd be an inquisition. Paperwork. Termination. Failure.  


"I'm with the Turks," he replied solemnly, licking his lips, "A nobody."  


"No." Hojo shook his head, cocking the pistol with a hollow, mechanical click. The gun was heavy; heavier than he thought a gun should be but then, this was his first experience with such a crude instrument. It felt blunt and chaotic. "That day in Shinra's office, I saw something in you that stood outside the realm of logical reckoning. I couldn't define it then, but 'Crecia saw it too and I swear by my eyes that you made her love you just to spite me. You... you swept her off her feet like any dashing monster might; you're... you're a s-single minded and short-sighted animal. It wasn't her fault in the end. It's not her fault now. It's all you."  


"No, it's you. It's all your fault." Vincent swallowed hard against the gun in his adam's apple. "All your own. You're the only monster here..."  


"NO! No, I am the better man! I am the one who beat you to her! I gave her my heart, Valentine. We exchanged vows! We made promises to each other! For years it was a dream-- a fucking dream and we had a life together. You're the diabolical cancer that slunk between us and stole it all away. I wish your lying face matched the devil inside. I can't tolerate the contradiction of you! The-- the lie! That's the danger! That's how you deceived her!"  


"You're goddamned insane!" Vincent blustered above the thunder, "There's nothing to me but what you see! A man that in the end was more worthy of Lucrecia than you!"  
"Like hell... Like hell is that true. I'll never give into that! Never! Oh, I wonder if I can't puzzle you out and fix a grievous error. Would you be worth it? Can you ever have a purpose outside of the seduction of the ignorant? Yes. I can put you to some use."  


"I won't do shit for you," Vincent growled, fingers curling to claws and digging at the wall impotently. Hojo stared at him a moment and the gun slackened at his throat a fraction. The scientist's dark eyes were contemplative, his breathing fast and loud against the voyeuristic mutter of the intrusive rain. Sticky hot sweat stood out on them both. At last, Hojo broke the confrontation with a strange sigh, arcing the pistol away from the man's neck and retreating a few hasty steps. Vincent almost fell to his knees, he'd been so crushed against the wall. As it was he stumbled forward, cupping a hand to his throat and drawing ragged breaths. The noise of his own panting enfuriated him and he made himself straighten, adjusting his jacket.  


"I knew you wouldn't," he exulted venomously, "You don't have the balls. Slow death in the gas chamber isn't your kind of thrill, mm? Idiot." Vincent glanced away from his grooming, smearing wet off his forehead, and saw Hojo had the gun raised again. The Turk cocked a cool eyebrow his way. "Now you're being ridiculous. You're not scaring me. You're holding it wrong. You're not looking down the sight. You're pathetic."  


He looked again when he didn't get an answer and thought Hojo's face was odd. He was grey. His eyes were chips of onyx in his skull and the Turk wanted to choke. Gun wavering, the Professor licked sweat off his upper lip. He squinted one eye shut and aimed.  


"Hojo, no--!"  


Abandoning his indifference, Vincent vaulted forward and grabbed for the gun but Hojo wrenched to the side and fired. Instead of a shattering crack, a silencer muzzled the blast of the bullet that tore from the chamber and sent the two men stumbling apart. Vincent felt a rolling fire through his arm and chest and folded to his knees, staring at the wet crescent of red on the tiles.. He tried to swear but he could only choke, his tongue refusing commands from his brain. He fell forward hard in a splash of blood.  


Trying not to throw up, Hojo wobbled on the balls of his feet, breathing strangely through clenched teeth. He regarded the mess he'd made, his chest heaving and his bony shoulders crunched together. Shakily he slid the pistol back in a desk drawer, closed it, then thought better of it, and spent a few moments trying to casually stack a few journals on top of the weapon with trembling hands. Then the drawer was locked and the key slipped into his wallet. He absently rubbed both hands on the front of his coat though there was nothing there.  


Ragged breaths broke from the Turk bleeding on the floor. Blood was pooling, racing trails through the grout, and Hojo was fascinated by it until gurgling words broke his concentration. What an ugly voice. The Professor approached his victim hesitantly, distastefully.  


"...I c-can't believe you did that," Vincent whispered in a liquid hiss, eyes screwed shut and feverish cheek pressed hard to the gritty floor. "Ffffine. Fine. It's... d-done now. But you leave her alone now. You... let her go now..." "Look at you." "...let 'er go!"  


Hojo laughed nervously. A white hand moved to his throat in a series of spasms and he worked his tie loose. "You've such a one track mind. I was aiming for your head so I needn't endure your whining. Ah, damn. Ah, damn. An amateur with a gun, I'll admit it. Well, when I was younger we would shoot the clay discs up on my uncle's property but..."  


"...please..."  


"Where'd your attitude go?" the man of science demanded, confidence growing, "You pathetic son of a bitch. Who's more worthy of her now? Man to man we did glorious battle and you're the one breathing blood. Do I inherit your knighthood?"  


Vincent wanted to answer but the world of sound and desire was slipping away. Trying to anchor himself to it, he grappled feebly with the slippery tiles, his chest heavy and hollow all at once. His will won out and he forced his eyelids open to a view of his torso. The bullet had ripped through his left arm and ploughed a diagonal path through his ribs. The triumph on Hojo's face made him close his eyes again. He listened to the thunder and waited to die. He could swear he heard Lucrecia somewhere, saying his name. He wished he could answer but didn't want her to come bear witness to the sticky, dirty, bloody thing in the middle of the lab.  


Grinning like a skull, Hojo swung himself up on an examination table and sat with his hands in his lap, legs dangling. The rain had relented and the room was still. Even the hum of the cycling air conditioners had quieted. Only the occasional dyspeptic muttering of the thunder disturbed the peace. And the soft, dreamy gurgle of the filters supporting Jenova's tank. And Vincent's losing battle for air. Hojo thought he looked ridiculous, squirming and flopping in his own blood as though he could stand if only he found the proper position from which to lever himself to his feet. He'd be slipping into shock any minute now. His lips were turning blue. He was shivering.  


"You die exquisitely," the scientist complimented, enchanted, "But I must complain that you go about it rather slowly. No one should overstay their welcome." He stared impatiently, anxiously, tapping his fingertips together. Gast could come in, or one of the assistants, or even 'Crecia. They couldn't see what he'd done. He didn't regret it of course - indeed he only wished he'd done this a long time ago, before the brown-eyed monster had inflicted the worst of his damage - but no one would understand that. Just like with Jenova, he was alone in his wisdom. "You haven't beat me, Valentine," he declared aloud, "You didn't force my hand. I wanted to do this all along. They'll never find your body. Think on that before you die. They'll never find you. She'll never know what happened. The capricious heart of a young man isn't to be trusted, alas. Perhaps she will decide that you left without her, unable to bear the thought of sharing your escape with a manipulative liar. Perhaps you were frightened by thoughts of the bundle of flesh and chemicals to which she will soon give birth. Who knows what'll pop out of her after all, eh? Ha, precious 'Crecia will curse your name and spend her last days despising you for ever inspiring her to hope. Think on that, Valentine. Stings a bit, doesn't it?"  


"P-please... please don't..."  


"What's that?"  
Hojo hopped off the table, pushing his glasses back up his nose. He approached Vincent quickly, like a skittish puppy, nearing until he was at the bourn of the gory puddle, the toes of his patent leather shoes just short of thrashing Vincent's blood. He bent his face close to the Turk's and whispered: "Few people have ever begged me for anything. Do it again. I like the sound of it."  


But Vincent wouldn't. He turned his face away and lay against the cold stone, feeling the life leave him. He'd been shot before. Lucky idiots in Wutai. A scared kid in Junon with his mother's burglar deterrant clutched in both sweaty hands. Most recently, a terrorist had clipped him in the thigh after a foiled attempt at industrial espionage in Sector Eight, his gun hidden inside a collapseable briefcases. But Vincent had never felt like this before. Death was sitting heavy on his chest, fat as his father when they used to wrestle on the carpet. Lucrecia sat heaviest on his heart and fogged his thoughts. He could see her face, a pale blossom in a midnight garden, when he closed his eyes. No... it was ending before it had been able to begin. He couldn't die and leave her stranded with Hojo, unprotected, dying and lonely at the mercy of a lunatic--  


A sharp agony in his arm made him scream and he was blinded by tears. Hojo took his heel from the bulletwound with a little sneer. "How could she love you?" he asked, completely mystified, "I don't understand. Explain it to me."  


"Let... her go. Don't keep her here. Cure... her..."  


"Shut up."  


Hojo stared at him, his arms crossed, his lips twitching. His right hand nervously rubbed his left arm, fingers spasming arthritically. He looked distant again, like before he'd pulled the trigger. "Do you see where it's all gotten you, Valentine?" he asked after a while. He wasn't sure if Vincent could hear him anymore but it was widely agreed that sound was the last sense to leave the dying body. "Maybe it wasn't your fault and this was, merely, destined to happen. Let's keep screwing around with destiny, eh? Let's make poetry."  


Vincent hovered between alive and dead. Starved for air, he didn't mind it terribly, lost for a while in his own headful of cold, blue cotton. He felt two hands pull at his jacket and slide him across the hard floor, but he didn't care. Blood had greased his clothes, aiding locomotion, but he moaned at the cut of his taut shirt into the bulletwound. A flap of skin hung from his forearm and leaked blood as the motion dislodged it. Hot and vital, it felt like someone else's as it snaked down his clammy wrist. This was nothing though, he realised distantly, as though soberly evaluating a comrade's medical chart. It was the wounds the bullet had made ricocheting around his ribcage that were killing him. The burn of blood in his lungs was bearable if he put himself somewhere else but he had to groan when the arms dragging him found the strength to heft his trim form up onto something hard and cold and flat. He lay awkwardly on his hip and shoulder until those sure hands flipped him sloppily on his back, arranging his limp arms at his sides and cutting off his white shirt. The garment was hefted, heavy with blood, and then it was gone.  


Chill crept over him and he shivered so violently that his teeth audibly rattled. Ha, he didn't think that really happened except in books. It was getting harder to think but he knew his teeth had never chattered before. Turn down the fucking air conditioning, Jimmy...  


There was a pinprick in his neck suddenly, and finally he began to tumble towards something final. Muffled darkness and muffled thunder and muffled rain. He was suffocating in black grasses. Things stalked through them and insects crawled up his back. Was that Jimmy coming? Jimmy would... Jimmy would bring someone and they would heal him and bloodsoaked Vincent would fetch Lucrecia, frightening her. He'd protect her. He would keep her and her baby safe from Hojo...  


The thoughts dissipated and there was only the faraway storm to concentrate on. And then finally there was nothing at all. 

________________________________________  


Jenova was staring at him.  


Hojo could swear to God that she was. His angel's face behind the chemicals was eyeing him with some passionate intensity. The rebuke was on her bruised lips. It trembled there.  


"What?!" he shouted, "You have a problem with something?"  


No answer of course. The Professor manipulated his forehead around and swiped at ticklish sweat with his shoulder. He always itched when he operated and it was least convenient. He would inevitably wind up smearing blood on his face when his nose started itching and he couldn't stand it anymore. It already seemed like Valentine's blood had spread, oozed, and splattered to every corner of the laboratory; he didn't need it on the tip of his nose too.  


Somewhere in the back of his thoughts, mingling with other unimportant matters like how hungry he was and how much his head hurt, Hojo knew he would have to clean this gory mess up before morning. He would have to strip off his coat, roll up his pants, come in here with a bucket, get down on his hands and knees, and scrub - but this was something to be aggravated about later. Art was the very act of converting otherwise meaningless fodder into either utilitarian or aesthetically pleasing creations. Artists did not trouble themselves when their paint spattered, their clay stuck in their fingernails, or their mineral spirits tipped over. Hojo, likewise, was not bothered by the bib of blood he wore now. The slivers of fibrous pink flesh stuck to the backs of his hands would strip off with his gloves. The materials were messy. Organic. They stained. He enjoyed them very much and every now and then would slide an appreciative digit along the smooth curve of an exposed kidney, or flick his nail lightly against a rib...  


Right now he needed to nail the inspiration while it was here and fresh. The operation took precedence above all other things. Afterwards he could stash the results, burn his clothes, clean and clean and clean, and then it would be like Vincent Valentine had never walked into his life and destroyed it. The only evidence would be locked in a vault to age and spoil like cheap wine. Justice will have been served then. Nature's mistake would be rectified and Hojo could go back to the Project with a clean conscience.  


But first he had to finish Valentine--  


Damn.  


An artery burst under his trembling scalpel and Hojo sighed inaudibly, reaching for a clamp as crimson ran. He was a wreck tonight. Dumb luck and a healthy constitution were the only reasons Valentine hadn't died already under his clumsy surgeons work. Too much coffee, he supposed blankly, watching his hands shake. Jenova's staring didn't help. Made him nervous.  


"Do you have a problem with this?" he asked again, looking beligerently at the tank, "I mean seriously, if you do, speak up. This is something I have to do for me. Alright? You wouldn't understand it."  


He didn't expect her to reply but it was quiet after the storm's passing, and a relief to simply shout out and hear his own exhausted voice in his ears. Jenova didn't stir, but then she never did; only floated in her glassy, amniotic sac with shadows for eyes and a thousand wires and monitors piercing her patient flesh. She frightened him sometimes. When he was wakeful late at night, working alone after all of the assistants had retired to their beds and it was quiet and peaceful except for the creaks of the mansion and his own rapid heartbeat, Hojo could swear he heard her breathing. The breaths were deep and ponderous from invisible lungs, tuned in to some rhythm a human being couldn't fathom. But Hojo questioned his own perceptions so late at night. Perhaps he only had an overactive imagination.  


Setting aside his blood-slicked scalpel, Hojo lofted his patient's mutated left arm and began fiddling with it, adjusting the newly soldered joints of the fingers. The damage to the human arm had been too severe. Unable to salvage it, Hojo had replaced it, testing one of the very theories that the Jenova Project sought to prove true: Jenova cells could indeed improve upon and even be used as replacement for human tissue. Hojo had used a sample from generous Jenova to grow Vincent a new arm. The results had been hideous - there had been no time to prepare the Turk's cellular structure for the sudden invasion of foreign tissue and so biology had battled and the human had lost. A mass of twisted, purple flesh extended up his elbow and his hand was a claw, more calcified rot than fingers. Hojo had to break the bones and plate each section of metacarpals with bronze to restore mobility to them; the metal strengthened the unstable, monstrous limb and it was beautiful besides, a flawless, glowing gold that gilded the precious Jenova-flavoured mutation beneath. He held it now, lovingly, and touched the limp, pointed fingers to his jaw. He rested his chin a moment in its palm and dipped his face forward, breathing in ozone, blood, metal, and ammonia.  


"I dare you to complain," he purred aloud, "You're lucky to be alive, poor monster. A less forgiving man would have put you in the incinerator." He frowned, laying the claw back at Vincent's side. His hands moved to his splayed chest again and he started plucking out clamps, tossing them in a bloody silver bowl. He was getting tired and it was nearly morning. Time to wrap this unhappy nonsense up and begin his string of lies to Lucrecia.  


A last, fitful scream of thunder protested from overhead and Hojo, startled, tilted his face to Jenova again, fixing her with bloodshot impatience.  


"What?!"  


But it didn't seem like she was looking at him now. The sightless monster gazed pointedly past him, in fact, right at the door of the Library. Hojo surrendered to his insanity and let his gaze follow hers, scoffing. He shouldn't have scoffed.  


He thought his eyes were playing tricks on him at first, picking out phantom faces from the contrasting textures, reflections, and shadows of the laboratory crypt-- but no, someone was standing in the doorway. Someone in a white shirt and necktie, his brown hair sloppy, his pale face bobbing in the blackness with his mouth opened wide in an O of surprise. His naked hand clutched the doorframe to steady himself. Hojo dropped a final gory clamp and stepped away from his slumbering work. He could feel Jenova's eyes burning into his back.  


"Jimmy, isn't it?" he called, approaching the young Turk quickly. His arms and shirtfront were covered in gore. His labcoat had stiffened with hard, nearly black streaks of blood and Jenova fluid, sticking to the clothes beneath in places. He could feel it writhing on him. Absently he scratched his nose and stained his face with watery red. Jimmy eyed him in queasy horror, too overwhelmed to speak. The Turk wanted to say something, but there was really nothing to say. It would help no one if he demanded to know what Hojo was doing. Accusing him of assaulting a coworker, or misusing company facilities for personal matters would not even begin to scratch the surface of what needed to be communicated. No. No, what did one say when one's friend and partner was sprawled out dead on an operating table with his chest cut open and blood slick on him like a second skin? What did one say to the guy who was carving him up like a turkey and approaching drunkenly with his hands out and a death's head rictus stretching his rubbery face like a coat hanger? Jimmy backpedaled and took off running, muttering a mantra of curses.  


"Damnit!" was just one of them. Then: "Fucking psychotic piece of shit!"  


Hojo was chasing after him before he could think about it. Jimmy thundered through the hallway in clumsy desperation, his blue blazer upstairs and his shirt a fluttering white bird in the gloomy corridor. He fixed his eyes on the spiral staircase and flung himself towards it, wishing he could fly. Oh, God, what had he just seen? He blinked and blinked and he couldn't rid himself of what he'd seen! He heard Hojo chasing him faster than he'd thought possible and his own legs seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.  


"Where d'you think you're going, Jimmy?!" the blood-fouled scientist demanded, tackling the Turk by the legs. The two men crashed into the bottom of the staircase, Jimmy face-first. Wood splintered, then exploded, cutting into his head and thrusting a jagged stake through his shoulder that punctured the last of his courage and set him to screaming.  


"What're you doing to Vincent, you fucking insane asylum?!" he snarled shrilly, pulling himself off the wicked little wooden spears and trying to regain his feet. Hojo was on his back, fisting his shirt and the hem of his pants, but Jimmy twisted around to pry him off, confident he was stronger than the little pansy and far more experienced with bare-knuckle brawling. Training didn't seem to be helping anyone tonight however. Hojo could turn men to monsters and desperation to triumph.  


Lips a trembling line of control, he leapt off the wounded Turk and launched a kick into his face before he could rise from his stoop, then dug his right hand into his coat pocket and drew another gun. The pistol wanted to slip out of his bloodied fingers but he choked up his hold on it and aimed. Jimmy groaned as the hot bullet punched a hole through his collarbone. He folded into the stairs again, sinking into the nest of broken wood and clasping his shoulder to staunch the flow of blood. "You miserable fuck!" he whispered in a high-pitched whine, blinking stars away, "That's Vincent's gun! What're you doing to him?!"  


"Fixing things," the scientist answered coldly, "What's it to you?" He took quick aim and fired, this time with more accuracy. Jimmy crumpled backwards with a bullet in his eye. In the final fleeting seconds of consciousness, he could feel a hand clawing at his ribs, drawing the wallet from his pocket indifferently. But then he didn't feel anything.  


"Interfering prick," Hojo muttered, stashing the warm gun in the back of his slacks. He flipped Jimmy's wallet open eagerly and thumbed through the credit cards, security passes, and gil marks until he found what he wanted. The little donor card was inspected against the hallway's low lighting and smiled at. "Blood type A. Perfection. Thank you, James."  


His loose forelock was tucked behind his ears, then Hojo grabbed a hold of the dead Turk's collar and began the laborious process of hauling his corpse back to the labs. Was fortune smiling on him or spitting on him? The mess at the foot of the stairs was going to require more manual labor than he was ordinarily comfortable with... Jimmy was bleeding so much. Look at this trail they were making. Perhaps he could get Lucrecia to clean up.. Oops! Never mind, guess not.  


He giggled to himself and winked at Jenova when she greeted their return to the laboratory with a serene and congratulatory nod.  


"Thanks for catching that," he told her amiably, "I owe you one." 

________________________________________  


And then it was six in the morning.  


Hojo looked at his wristwatch with blurry eyes, smearing blood off the face so he could see the indiglow read-out. He yawned and stretched and absently looked down on the fruit of his labors. He felt like a bat. Crouched over Valentine, he had one naked foot to either side of his stomach, his bloody toes curling in the tacky, congealed fluids, his chin in his hands. Valentine was as pale as a marble man but he was alive. The faintest flush of life glowed on his high cheekbones. His lips were blue, but they murmured as they drew in breaths. Pale as death but alive. Saved.  


"Wake up," Hojo commanded softly. The white face below did not stir. "Wake up, Valentine. I know that you can. I've saved you." He stared at him viciously, sinking until he was balancing on his knees, nearly astride the Turk's chest and its stinking coat of brown antibacterial wash. But he didn't dare put his full weight on the stitches there. Instead he leaned forward, a hand to either side of Valentine's head for support, and moved his face so close that his hair hung in the Turk's slumbering eyes. He could smell his gentle breaths. "Was I successful?" he mused in a warm whisper, secretive, "I can imagine no reason why this would fail. Most of the procedure was culled from Professor Gast's research and we all know what an infallible genius he is. It's a pity I can't show him what I've done with his science. But he wouldn't understand. His science... his science is a plebeian bore compared with my flair. Look at this claw! Could Gast have ever conceived anything so brilliantly apropos? Gast and all of his petty ambitions are mundane; transient, superficial; they will pass into history and be forgotten. My theories will have the real staying power. My theories... my brilliance... that even now is waiting to be born inside Lucrecia..."  


That name seemed to rouse something in the man beneath him. Hojo saw a minute trembling in the muscles around his eyes, as though even in darkness he was trying to search out the owner of that name. Hojo's hard expression softened for an instant and all of the pride drained from him like blood. "It could have been very beautiful," he admitted casually, swinging himself off of the examination table and nearly slipping in the viscid gore. "Yet it was not meant to be, St. Valentine. Lucrecia's mine. You did... almost have her though. I almost let you die. If the philosophers are to be believed, that might have allowed the pair of you to eventually come together again in the green hell. But no, no, you don't deserve that. What you deserve is to live on as what you should have always been - a monster. Only wait. Only wait and watch, Vincent. You'll see that you don't understand the... the poetry in blood. I'll teach you. I'll see you together, one day; proper, corrupted, hateful, ignorant prince and princess together in death. You'll see how it all comes together. You'll see I'm not cruel."  


Hojo paced the length of the library, hands clasped tight at his back. It was so late. Or rather, so early. He could already hear movement from the floors above as the rest of the mansion awoke. He thought he could smell coffee percolating and bacon sizzling. What would he tell the Turk leader about his two missing men? He would say nothing at all, that's what. He would certainly appear precisely as concerned and aggravated as Gast when he was told their protection had wandered away though. Oh, yes, and no one would contribute more to the search effort than Professor Hojo. Where, oh where had the two Turks gone?  


He would get away with this yet. He was certain of it. The bloody corridor had been mopped and he'd scrubbed the laboratory tiles and sterilized all of his tools. He'd even shut off the overheads and brought out a blacklight to find the pinpricks of spattered red between the computer towers and the baseboards. Jimmy's body had been temporarily disposed of; now he need only do away with his friend and he could call it a night. His inspiration was spent.  


"...sha...?..."  


The faintest sound from behind his back. Hojo was incredibly surprised to turn around and see Vincent Valentine sitting up on the examination table, examining his new claw with a look on his face too exhausted to be horrified. He collapsed immediately backwards and nearly tipped off the table onto the floor. Hojo rushed to his side and shouldered him back to safety. "You just have this aversion to cooperating, don't you?" he muttered, "You're a fine, finished creature, but you'll take months to heal fully. The ketamine's slower than I thought. You shouldn't be able to move. Come on then."  


As Jenova looked wordlessly on, Hojo wheeled out a gurny and rolled mumbling Vincent onto it. The Turk's eyes were open. He stared at the scientist and Library as though he couldn't remember them. From the glint of light off the stranger's round glasses to the swimming texture of the bricked walls, everything struck him as alien and unfamiliar. It was all too clear; too bright. Hojo's pores fascinated him. The computer monitors looked like glowing portals into small worlds of firing wires and electronic orgasms. Something... something was wrong with his eyes. He saw things suddenly that he'd never noticed before: the split ends of his own blood-gummed hair in his eyes, the dust motes bobbing carelessly in the dim passage to the library-- the library. He could read the spine of every book, though the lights were off. He saw through a magnifying glass tinted red.  


He muttered in alarm and tossed his head weakly. "Ah," breathed Hojo delightedly, grabbing his face and peeling back an eyelid, "So the melanin was affected! I'd feared it - the genetic alteration was so rushed and sloppy, but Jenova picked up the slack in her own way and mutated the retina and nerve connections. Impressive. I wish... How I wish I could study you for a while, Valentine. What about your--"  


"...hear her..."  


"Hmm?"  


He could hear her. Somewhere in the floors above, he could hear Lucrecia crying. This wasn't some drugged delusion. He could discern each choking sob though they were muffled by... by a hand to her mouth or a tissue to her face. She was in her bedroom. He saw her there, curled up on the coverlet behind a curtain of hair. She leaned her face into the pillow, hope shattered, shaking like a child and hiccoughing in that way she had when she cried. Vincent knew her crying better than her laughter. Desolate, she'd clutched him and sobbed into his chest when he'd promised to take her away. He'd sent her to the village for a truck and she must have come back in the night, expecting him to be ready to leave with her. But he'd been gone, trapped in the laboratory with a monster because he hadn't held his temper. Now she wept.  


Vincent could hear it.  


She wept alone and what could he do to comfort her?  


"...she's crying, Hojo...?"  


"What?" The ephemeral giddiness had left the scientist and now he was miserable and tired, his tone broken with disappointed exhaustion. He shoved the gurny into the corridor, the steel wheels catching on every bump and rift along the way. Vincent bucked in pain, twining bloody fingers and creaking claw through naked air as his thoughts rolled over in confusion. Where the hell was he and what the hell had happened? He should be dead. He wasn't dead? There was nothing stopping him then from clasping Lucrecia's arm and pulling her after him out of hell. It would be a long drive out of the mountains. She pleaded with him to hurry. He couldn't move.  


The deed was done and now Hojo needed an appropriate gallery for his grisly creation and his distasteful crime. The company had built their mansion atop an ancient crypt of course and now the scientist realised why. They had done it for him! No, Nibelheim's elders hadn't wanted to sell the sacred land to Shinra's contractors at first, but enough gil and they'd forgotten their ancestors' graves, happily signing every scrap of legalese the President's lawyers had set before them. But fuck gil. It had been fate that had coerced those old men. Fate! Fate knew that one dark dawn Professor Hojo would have a living corpse to bury, and he'd need a private plot of course!  


Jubilant again, he wrenched open a door in the corridor, lapping drool from his lower lip. The ancient portal creaked on its hinges and he flung it against the wall in a shower of filth and rotting wood.  


"This is disgusting," he muttered, squinching his face up in distaste, "I love it. I love it."  


When Shinra's crew had laid the mansion's foundations and dug the labyrinth of cellars and subterranean storage rooms, the crypt had been discovered so near the wall of this certain corridor that they'd considered breaking through and blocking it off more permanently with cement. President Shinra, when consulted, had been convinced it could be converted into a storeroom and save him that much more gil in construction expenses. So it had stayed. Despite the President's frugal plan however, no one had even thought to look in there till now. The scientists passed it daily, pretending they didn't know what was behind the door.  


Hojo kicked at skulls and broken pottery as he tremulously entered the sacrosanct sepulchre, parting cobwebs with pale hands. It did not smell, as he had thought it would. It was musty, dry and positively frigid. Quiet too. The pattering rain could not hope to torment this final peace. It was as though time had ceased to exist here, yet the evidence of time was all about. The ancient bricks were barely restrained by their crumbling mortar niches, already exposed beneath the last, clinging remnants of greyed plaster, and the old marble architecture had split, tilted, and buckled beneath water damage in one corner of the ceiling. All of the wooden caskets - once extravegantly carved, gilded, and adorned with bronze accents - were rotten, the lids putrefied off many of them and revealing embarassed skeletons. The bone men lay exposed on mildewed satin, forgotten white ghosts eager to leer and laugh at their sudden audience. Hojo crushed a skull to dust beneath one shoe, finding it far too amused for his liking. He grunted. "I think this place will perfectly suit you, St. Valentine. You can all moulder together."  


Pushing up his sleeves, Hojo approached an impressively intact coffin at the center of the room and irreverently slid the lid away. The corpse inside had been a soldier, he thought; the rotting remnants of a primitive musket were clutched in fleshless metacarparls and an old rusted rapier lay parallel against one hip. The tarnished glint of gold pinned to the remnants of its collar hinted at some high rank but what did that mean now as the skeleton turned to dust here in the ignominious dark, sold by his progeny for a paltry sum of gil? Hojo tore the decorations away and flung them to the dirt.  


"What good did these do you?" he asked the corpse, "Ha, where are your works, man?" The Professor sneered, feeling the foul air strike his teeth, and he could taste it when he closed his mouth to swallow. Snatching a hold of the dead thing's crisp throat, he hoisted the surprisingly heavy bones from the casket dispassionately. Then, in laughing triump, he cleared out the musket and sword, flinging handfuls of fabric scraps, dust, and hair from the rotten red velvet until he felt it was prepared to receive a fresh body. What an appropriate frame it was for his difficult monster. What a vase. Hojo took great joy in bashing the soldier's bones to white shards and spreading the chunks around with petulant kicks of his filthy shoes. "Come now, Valentine," he finally beckoned, glancing to the gurney with dusty clothes full of spiderwebs and filth. "Let's see how you look in here."  


Vincent only saw Lucrecia, his drug-addled mind obsessed with thoughts of her alone, sobbing helplessly into her hands in a nest of bedding. Each gasp tormented him. The choking sobs tore rents along his sanity and he heard himself make terrible noises. He'd been meant to save her. Why couldn't he go to her now and stop those tears? Listen to her! They were so near!  


"...no, don't you hear her..?"  


"Yes, yes," Hojo dismissed, maneuvering the awkward gurney parallel to the empty coffin's side. "You're a fortunate man. You're about to experience a revolution in modern medicine. Imagine being able to freeze the dying in a comatose condition of statis, halting the aging process without prohibiting the unconscious expansion of the mind... We can do it with Jenova and a cocktail of drugs. You'll see, fortunate, fortunate, Mr. Valentine. These delusions now are only the chemicals affecting your mind. Will they react as predicted to the Jenova cells in your system? Will they kill you? Rave quietly, pioneer."  


"...don't cry... I'll come..."  


"Uh-huh."  


With a little grunt, Hojo rolled Vincent from the steel gurney to the inside of the musty casket. He landed heavily, throwing up a cloud of bug husks and dust, tears standing out like blood in his bright red eyes. Hojo adjusted him until he thought he would be comfortable, crossing his hand and claw over his stomach and tilting his face to the splotched ceiling. He should have dressed him. There were spare coats in lockers in the labs, but that wasn't what Hojo wished for. No, it was best to leave it this way, perhaps. Let him shiver. The scientist held the claw a long moment, running his fingers along each trembling, pointed digit, tugging them so the Turk gasped in pain. He traced the stitched paths on his chest, lingering on the rapid, frightened palpitations from his struggling heart.  


"So there," he said finally, stepping back with sudden self-awareness. What a fool he was... but Valentine did look ineffably appropriate laid like a living corpse in this stinking box. "Beautiful," he agreed with himself aloud, grinning and adjusting the claw again, then brushing a few strands of hair from the Turk's brow. Without warning, Vincent's red eyes snapped to attention, opening and shutting rapidly, unfocused. He tried to sit up but couldn't.  


"...the hell..?"  


"A moment of clarity before the end?" Hojo asked, delving into his coat pocket and smiling, softly. The hall light caught his glasses and they glowed. Bright as two white suns, Vincent had to squint sensitively against them and turn away, his head blaring. "That's your misfortune. I can't chat anymore. I have to go clean up the mess you've made."  


"Where am I?"  


Hojo produced a syringe and held the needle to the scant light, checking the dosage. "You recall the crypt they discovered beneath the construction site, surely," he reminded. Bowing close, his dragging forelock tickled Vincent's throat and the Turk thought he was suffocating again. "Shinra possesses insight he's barely aware of. This old tomb will prove more functional than he ever imagined. A storage room indeed. More accurately a place for me to stash my trash. Perhaps we'll keep James here too. Rent's cheap."  


Revelation descended on Vincent in one unbearable wave of sensation; suddenly he felt the rough, ruined velvet beneath his naked shoulders. He smelled the bittersweet stench that stained this morbid bed and he could taste it - blood, rot, and horror. He tried to move, sending panicky commands to his dead limbs but they betrayed him, petrified with fear or drugs, he didn't know. In silent terror he writhed motionless, furious, even as Hojo jabbed the needle into his jugular. "D-don't leave me down here!" he ordered between clenched teeth, "That's your plan, isn't it? I'll scream my head off, I swear to God! They'll find you out and they'll execute you, d'you understand me?!"  


"I'll admit the idea was momentarily sobering earlier," Hojo calmly replied, withdrawing the needle and gravely contemplating his answer for a moment. "But I'm confident I've dealt with everything incriminating. You, Valentine, make very poor threats. They sound good - very vicious, very sincere - but really, they amount to bullshit, don't they? I've won. I'm taking all the spoils for myself."  


Dizziness struck like a mallet to the skull and Hojo's face swam in circles before Vincent's stinging eyes. He tossed his head, wheezing, and the exhaustion dragged at his thoughts and joints. Suddenly he was so tired he thought he might shut his eyes and never open them again. The weight on his chest was back. Had the crypt caved in? Vincent struggled against the relentless, ennervating waves but he felt himself drowning. Arms burning, Hojo hefted the casket's great oak lid and levered it snugly back atop the coffin, sliding it into place and charmed by its perfect fit, even after a century of rot.  
"Don't leave me down here!" Vincent pleaded, the words catching on a sob. The sudden black was palpable. The lid didn't let in the merest crack of grey. He'd never been afraid of the dark before. The concept was ridiculous but this was more than darkness; this seemed like the finishing of all light. "Please! Please don't leave me here! Let me go to her!"  


Swiftly, Hojo went to work nailing the coffin shut. He made short work of it, plucking nail after nail out of his prickling coat pocket. Each blow of the hammer made him cringe, terrified someone would hear the reports and come to investigate. But no one came. After fifty-three nails, no one had come. Vincent's protests were so faint Hojo had to press his ear to the wood to catch them. "...tell me you'll leave her alone," he begged in quiet delerium, "That, if nothing else, tell me that... please..."  


"What difference would it make?" Hojo asked coldly, dropping the hammer to the dust. The chill air was finally making him shiver in his sweaty clothes and he held himself, scraping his hands up and down his biceps. What a terrible place this was; a terrible beauty, like Jenova. He hoped never to come in here again. "You're a ghost now, Valentine," he whispered, shoving the gurney out of the door ahead of him. "You don't make a difference anymore. Good-bye."  


Vincent heard the door close with an awful keening, just as he'd heard the lid slam down on him, the crack of each nail being hammered. But he was really too tired to be scared. All that persisted was Lucrecia's crying. It was a little quieter now with these wooden walls to muffle the sound, but he heard it anyway. Distantly... from another world, she called his name in a frightened whisper, and he could hear it though he didn't know why. He had passed to the land of the dead. Communion with the living... made no sense.  


He said her name anyway and, for a moment, sealed there in the blackness, Vincent thought it was almost as though they were talking to eachother. When she whispered his name in return, his heart melted. Here she was, defying this blackness, white and dying with him in his unjust coffin.  


Never change... Please don't leave without me or change your mind. I'll return tonight, and we'll go together...  


There was her hand. He knew it was hers because the ring was on it, the gold band and the modest ruby. If he could make her hear him... "Here," he panted.  


He heard Hojo. With unctuous concern the scientist comforted Lucrecia, explaining how he was returned from a conference with the Turk leader to inform her of Vincent's resignation. Vincent and his crude friend Jimmy had run off together, he regretted to tell her, and-- She was hysterical now, beating Hojo's narrow chest and calling him a liar, but his careful words soon calmed her and she collapsed into his arms. Vincent heard it all. Hallucinations crept upon him like decay. Lucrecia huddled in Hojo's embrace, sobbing uncontrollably against his shoulder, her face obscured by a shroud of hair. Hojo forgave her. She called herself a fool to have been duped by a murderer's lies but she didn't tell Hojo she was sorry. Then she called herself a fool to have believed she might ever make right her terrible crimes. Hojo shushed her. He removed her clothes, tracing the dome of her white belly with glass-eyed avarice. They laid on the coverlet together and she was motionless and sobbing as he asserted his ownership.  


Vincent knew Hojo was smiling.  


And he fell into sleep and nightmares with that smile burned into his thoughts.  
________________________________________  
1999


	2. Chapter One: Nibleheim

After a while, Zack forced himself to speak only to break the silence.

"So. What's it look like out there?"

His voice was almost lost in the roar of the airship's engine. The voice that answered his was even quieter.

"...looks just as he said it would."

"So he wasn't bluffing then? Bastard. But no surprise really. I suppose I had the feeling he was telling the truth all along. You can more or less tell when old Hojo's talking out of his ass, and when he's decided the truth'll hurt more than any lie. He was sneering enough. He was sneering so hard I thought his face would cave in."

Zack laughed darkly to himself, then stretched his lanky but toned arms straight in front of him, popping his elbows and cracking his knuckles. Ugh. Too long cramped in this damned airship in this dusty, claustrophobic room. He could feel the thrill of the vicious Nibelheim wind screaming through the bulkheads, and he ground his back into its invisible fists like a massage. He wished he could let them in if only for some excitement. If he had his sword he'd go berserk and gash a hole in the ship, just for the hell of it; gash both their ways to freedom and let the wind in all at once.

Heh... stupid. He hadn't touched the hilt of a sword in four years. He didn't like to consider how out of practice he must be.

_I bet even Aeris could beat me in a straight-on, no holds barred now_. He chuckled to himself, gazing at his pale hands. He bent his fingers experimentally and examined old scars on his knuckles. Half of these marks had been graduation presents from an old fencing instructor. It was doubtful he'dl ever see him again though. It was doubtful anyone even remembered him anymore.

"Zack?"

The blue-eyed Soldier glanced up at his name, setting morbid thoughts aside.

"Yeah?"

Another pair of blue eyes met his, Cloud's misted with fear and unshed tears.

"C'mere, you have to see," he whispered, turning again to their cell's single window. "Look at it. Look what they've done..." He was leaning heavily against the raised rim of the porthole, staring unblinking at some horror barely visible beneath the misty, fat cloud cover. Ignoring the knot of dread in his stomach, Zack pushed himself to his feet and looked over his friend's shoulder, already having some idea of what would meet his eyes. Hojo had been mocking them both with horrible possibilities for weeks, ever since his assistants had accidentally let it slip to the 'specimens' that they'd all be returning to the mansion today. "To utilize the facilities and mako reactor there," they'd said. Still, knowing what he'd see outside the window didn't keep the actual sight from tearing a hole in Zack's heart.

"S'funny," he whispered, watching the shadow of the airship shrink and swell over the pastoral rooftops below. Cloud glanced at him strangely. "It's only disturbing because it _isn't_ a stretch of bodies and ashes. If it was still smoking, I don't think I'd mind seeing Nibelheim again at all really. But not like this. This is like looking at a cemetary."

The tiny mountain village had been restored. All of God damnedable Nibelheim had been rebuilt. And even though the airship remained dizzyingly high above the village's chimneys, both Cloud and Zack could see how thorough the job had been. The old well, the brick and plaster homes, the cobblestone streets, even the wear and tear of hundreds of years had all be recreated. A blood-colored dusk depicted the crime with a tangible glee, the rays of the setting sun sending fires into the streets again. It was too perfect; too real. Someone had done a marvelous job, without a doubt. Zack ground his molars together and cursed to himself, the smell of blood and mako from that long-ago night in his nostrils again.

"Pretty damn low of them, you know," he muttered, "Pretty damn low."

For just a moment, fire flashed in Zack's mind followed by memories of a sword and pain and a night that seemed like a nightmare now. The surrealism of "The Nibelheim Affair" was maddening suddenly. Had it really happened? Look how neatly, then, it had all been disposed of. The village had been nothing but blackened boards, corpses, and a few desolate lines of smoke last time he'd seen it. That had been, what, four years ago? Almost five? He barely bothered keeping track of the days anymore. Strange, when at first it had seemed so damned important to keep a grip on that; to mark his birthday, Cloud's, and the holidays. It had been a link to reality.

"You know though, Cloud, this is just proof positive. We don't have a place in reality anymore. You realise that?"

"Nah," Cloud answered softly, blue eyes piercing the mist as the airship drew closer to the town. The homes and businesses grew larger, looming close and shutting out the mountainside. They'd rebuilt Tifa's house, he saw. He couldn't tear his attention away from it. "Our realities have just changed is all," he muttered, "Our reality is just different now."

Zack grunted noncommitally and leaned back heavily against the bulkhead. Their room onboard was small and dark and cold as hell - one more cage after five years of endless prisons. "How well do you remember the mansion?"

Cloud shifted weight from his right foot to his left, hanging heavily off the window frame and looking fixedly at the flawless recreation of his hometown. "I remember it from when I was a kid but... I... I can't remember ever going inside. I don't know. I remember your stories though. It's a real pit, yeah?"

"Yeah," Zack sighed, "A pit."

Engines were wheezing, shifting gears as the airship began its laborious landing procedures. Cloud watched Nibelheim grow huge, the mansion and the mountains reaching over the unassuming homes and throwing huge shadows stained black by the brooding, setting sun. Orange light sizzled on the cobblestones like hot grease and turned the water in the well to molten gold. It all appeared perfect and peaceful, just as it had so long ago. The corpses had vanished. The blood had been hosed away. Cloud wondered if they'd bured the bodies. Zack tried not to think about it.

"Hojo's here, right?"

Zack looked up, crossing his arms. "Yup. As always."

"Haven't seen him in a while," Cloud mumbled, trying to still his trembling hands, "Haven't minded it honestly."

The two laughed nervously. The airship lurched as its ponderous landing gear creaked into position and met the ground with an unsteady judder that wracked the bulbous transport from nose to stern. The jolt nearly knocked the pair to their knees but then the roaring machinery began gradually to quiet. The engines sputtered protests at first, choking on gasoline, but the Shinra pilots killed them efficiently. The airship lay dead, pacified or euthanized into an intense, buzzing silence. No sooner did it settle than there errupted the shouts of an unloading crew who descended on the ugly, grounded bird and cracked open her hatches. Clamorous crashing came as the rear cargo holds were pulled apart. The steel slabs weighed a ton apiece and gouged furrows into the grass as pounding boots ran their lengths with crates on dollies, precariously piled on forklifts or even in bare arms.

"Careful, gentlemen. The contents of these crates are worth more than your lives."

Tseng was expressionless as he supervised the orange-clad workers unloading the dozens of wooden crates, steel barrels, and enormous, mako batteries from the Highwind's hold, carting them through the deserted village streets and towards the black edifice at the far end of town. Frigid air whipped his hair into his face and he discreetly spit out strands of it. There were a thousand and one reasons he didn't want to be here right now.

Shit. Here came Reason #1.

"We are _late_ ," was Professor Hojo's greeting upon approaching the stony-faced leader of President Shinra's illustrious Turks. The scientist had one thin hand pressed to his crown, preventing his greasy black forelock from blowing as it would in the mountain winds. Rebellious, his ponytail lashed his back like a wiry scourge. "For a man with such an exhaustively lauded reputation, you have certainly managed to screw up a simple venture. Remind me, Tseng, to listen less to other people's opinions in the future." The Turk leader knifed the little man with his black eyes and frowned.

"We are only fifteen minutes behind schedule, Professor," he replied calmly, "That is only because the winds off the peaks grew momentarily too severe to navigate. It had nothing to do with myself, the pilots, or the crew. Calm down."

"Calm down," Hojo muttered, kicking at the dirt, "You wouldn't be so at ease if you were the one in charge. It's easy enough to take orders and leave the responsibility to me, isn't it? It's sundown - nearly evening. It is dangerous to be unloading millions of gil in equipment in the dark, don't you agree? It is particularly dangerous and particularly foolish considering this wretched village's reputation. I would feel safer in Zozo."

"Yes, Professor," Tseng relented with a mental sigh. He didn't bother explaining that fifteen minutes would have made no difference in this situation. Sunset had started half an hour ago, after all. However, he couldn't hold his tongue on all accounts. "I must remind you," he began coolly, "That I _am_ leader of the Turks and I _do_ know very well what it is like to bear the heavy burden of responsibility. Do not dismiss me, Professor."

"Pssshhh," Hojo breathed, waving him off then clapping his chilly hands together and hissing hotly on his fingertips. "I am not going to stand here and argue who is the more miserable son of a bitch between us. Tell the stooges to be careful with the equipment. The facilities in this dump are ancient and, by all acounts, dysfunctional. The team and I need all the help we can obtain if we are to accomplish anything worthwhile these next few months."

Hojo stalked off in a hissy-fit before Tseng could reply, two of his protege dashing forward from the airship to trot at his heels and yip questions in his ears. Flipping his collar up against the chill, Tseng rolled his eyes and allowed himself a small "Idiot" beneath his breath before returning to the airship. He crossed his arms, tucking his fingers inside his elbows. For a moment, he attempted to fathom how precisely he had been cursed with this distasteful assignment and how it was that Rude and Reno had both managed to worm their ways out of it—

"Hey! Watch it there!"

The sound of a crate hitting the earth, splitting apart, and its contents smashing into thousands of unidentifiable fragments, brought Tseng out of his revery. A workman looked at the shattered mess guiltily for a moment, blinked, then glanced helplessly to his superior.

"Oops."

"Yeah," Tseng sighed, massaging his brow, "Go tell Hojo 'Oops' and see where it gets you. Out of my way."

Tseng shoved the meek culprit aside and stormed up the airship's gangplank into the cold darkness of the hold. His breaths rose in crystallized puffs from his lips as he fumbled with a ring of keys, choosing one to slip into a door near the back of the compartment. He knocked a bit, politely, with the toe of his dress shoe before pushing it open.

Zack heard the unassuming intrusion and jumped immediately to his feet. Cloud turned and tensed simultaneously. Both watched Tseng enter with two identical sets of narrowed blue eyes, their brows dark but their hands fisted impotently at their sides. Despising their captors was as routine as mealtimes and bathroom breaks. They hated the scientists and the Turks, but it was expected and accomplished nothing. Hate simply helped them endure.

"Heya, Tseng," Zack greeted bitterly, backing up with crossed arms against the rear wall of the tiny room, "They got you playing Igor to Dr. Hojo again? Better quit hanging around him so much, you'll grow a hump on your back."

"Ha ha. Glad to see the long flight hasn't dulled your wit."

"Hasn't made you any more the master of clever retorts either, has it, Turkey boy? So, I take it we're in Nibelheim?"

Tseng frowned but nodded, leaning in the doorway. He looked to Cloud and saw a wounded animal, eyes wide, full of fear and thoughts of escape. The Turk leader put a hand towards his shoulder but Cloud shrank away. He didn't like to be touched. After so long in Hojo's care, he had learned to associate touch with pain. Shinra meant pain. And so he fled Tseng's attempt at comfort and wilted into himself. Only an occasional threatening glance towards his captor showed that he was paying attention to the situation at all. Cloud's bright blue eyes fixated on the bulge of the gun tucked inside Tseng's suit jacket. The gun was why he shouldn't go insane and leap for the Turk's throat. The gun meant the other man was in control, just like Hojo and the guards and the rest of the Turks.

Cloud was helpless.

"What's the matter with you?" Tseng snapped, stormy brows lowering. He gestured them through the door and outside. Cloud skipped ahead gingerly but Zack took his time, shrugging in response to Tseng's question.

"It should be fairly obvious, even for a braindead hitman like you," he answered with a sniff, "How would you like to see the graves of the ones you loved desecrated like this? I don't know how Cloud is managing to do anything but kick yours and Hojo's sorry asses."

Tseng laughed aloud at the vitriol in his prisoner's voice and slowly shook his head, following Zack out of the dim cell. He popped him in the back of his head and snapped, "As though he could. As though either of you unfortunate little guinea pigs have ever been able to do anything. You're fortunate I've always pitied you too much to do anything about your insults and your hollow threats, Zack. Otherwise... well, I won't even go into otherwise. Just count your blessings."

Zack answered with an impatient huff, squinting his eyes against the light as he came into the red glow of dusk. Evening had come but even the setting sun, still was painful to his sensitive eyes. Natural light after five years in a cage or in a lab shot through his head like an arrow. Practically blinded, he smacked into Cloud as his friend came to an abrupt halt ahead.

"What's wrong?"

Cloud wrapped his arms tight around himself and shook his head. His shoulders trembled as he quickly took in the gloomy Nibelheim streets they now stood in. His old home, the inn, the shops and houses of his friends. Zack saw him look at his home for a long time before turning away, sorrow haunting his eyes just as dismally as the mako. He began to take a few steps towards it.

Cloud could almost hear her calling... He heard his mother's voice: a scold, a laugh, a joke, a cry of pain. So fresh, as though it was really there, as though she was truly behind those walls as she always had been. No one had ever cared for him as she had. She'd been a good mother, hadn't she? Hadn't she..?  
He missed so much of his old life.

"She's not in there, Cloud," Zack said, clamping a caring hand on his friend's shoulder to calm him. It didn't take a lot to set him off.

"But maybe... look, maybe it was never burnt," he whispered delusionally, half-heartedly trying to break free of Zack's hold, "Look, Zack. _Look_ , maybe it never happened and we both dreamed that night! Look! The town looks fine!"

"You know that's not true, c'mon. This is all Shinra's doing. They just rebuilt the place."

Cloud whipped around and threw Zack's arm off, sprinting a few jerky steps towards his old home. His eyes were wild. "But the lights behind the windows! Th-they... they couldn't do all this. That's insane!"

"Cloud, you know they can. And it seems they have."

"Control your friend, Zack." Tseng's words were a warning. He didn't have the patience to deal with a rash of shit tonight. Zack glared at him, then turned back to Cloud.

"Think her body's still in there?" the blonde screamed, "Think they just built the house back up around her? Do you, Zack? Or maybe they made me a new mother too! Why the hell not?!"

"Stop it, Cloud!"

But he was ready to run inside and see if his speculation was true. Why not? Why couldn't she be inside? And Tifa too and all the old faces from his childhood? Sephiroth had been a nightmare, none of it had been real-- he'd been remembering a lie for four years. Yes. Yes, she was in there and waiting. Something hummed in his skull and told him it was true.

Tseng was sick of the delay. With an impatient snort, he ordered two of the guards to grab Cloud by the arms and haul him off through the streets to the mansion. Cloud saw them coming and stiffened, his fists balling in preparation for a fight. He threw away their grappling arms furiously and three more guards ran forward to keep him from bolting towards his home. He had to get there. He _knew_ she was inside, just as she'd been when he'd come home four years before. But this time his face wasn't hidden behind a mask. This time he'd tell her the truth before Sephiroth came and burnt her alive. She wouldn't die thinking he was something he wasn't. She'd know. She'd know! He would tell her.

"Cloud!" Zack called, wincing when the guards beat savagely on his delusional friend. He tried to interfere but a look from Tseng quashed that idea. Cloud looked up with a bloody nose, nearly obscured by the half dozen arms reaching for her collar, and gave Zack a look that broke the former Soldier's heart. Tears dropped from Cloud's dazzling eyes.

"She's in there!" he sobbed, "They're just keeping her from me! They don't want me to know! Why we back here, Tseng? Where's Hojo?? I want to see Hojo!!"

Screaming in rage and bellowing his commands, Cloud took the head of one of the attacking guards and twisted it about, throwing the man to the ground. Two others jumped him, pinning his arms but he kicked out hard with his right foot into one of their faces and heard something crunch, then a scream of agony and he was free. He sprinted towards his home in desperation, two very pissed guards on his heels, both swearing and wiping blood from their noses. Zack decided to hell with Tseng. He bolted after his friend, fearing what he might do when he saw that his mother wasn't really there. Cloud's rages came and went without warning these days but they were always violent and never ended well.

Cloud ran towards a reunion that in his mind was just on the other side of a closed door. It was all so perfect... That worn wooden door, that house, his own old home, all of it just as he remembered it and _not_ reduced to rubble and ash and bones. Where other memories were dim, he could so clearly recall running from mean little brats in the rain, blood in his eyes, looking for sanctuary and this house had always been that to him. This house and the warm arms of his mother inside. When Tifa had been too busy with the other boys, Mother was there to explain why none of that mattered because she loved him more than anyone else ever could. Wasn't she in there now? That shriveled, blackened body he'd briefly seen curled into a ball that fiery night had to have been an illusion because a woman with so much love in her heart, such a firm hold on life... She could never _die_. It was ridiculous possibility. Sephiroth had known nothing of her. She'd be inside now, standing over the fire and making his favourites, waiting anxiously for him to run into her arms again.

Cloud shakily reached a hand to the doorknob, the mountain chill in the air blowing against his bare sweaty arms. His fingers found the old grooves and the rattling old door swung slowly open, the hinges catching momentarily half-way through as they always did. The same smell. The same sound of creaky, unoiled hinges. He was home.

"What's your problem, boy?"

There was a woman standing on the other side of the door. She had stringy hair and was dressed in dirty jeans and a teeshirt. She eyed Cloud impatiently, one hand poised in front of her as though she'd been about to step outside herself and see what the commotion was all about. Her squinty black eyes ran over the young man now and there was nothing maternal there.

"What are you doing in my house?"

Cloud choked, taking a trembling step backwards. He couldn't even hear the approach of the guards. His hands clenched into fists. "You're in the wrong place," he whispered, "Who the hell are you?"

"What're _you_ on?" the woman mocked, eyes narrowed. She looked over Cloud's shoulder and raised an eyebrow at Tseng and Zack. "You Shinra lose one of your monkeys?" she called, "Little late for this nonsense, thanks much."

Cloud almost sank to the ground, unshed tears standing out bright in his mako blue eyes. Horror turned his face to an ugly white, splotches of red burning on his cheeks. A sudden rage superceded everything and his lips turned blue.  
The woman gave a strangled cry when Cloud leapt at her, arms outstretched to snap her neck. He tackled her like a fleeing pig and his knee made contact with her sternum as they both tumbled backwards into the house, Cloud's fingers wrapped around her throat. "You're one of them, aren't you?!" he hissed, sobs choking his accusation. The stranger gagged, clawing at his fingers and drawing blood with ragged nails. Her legs bicycled and she tried to shake her head and squeak out some response but all she could manage were gasps for air. Cloud shoved his knee further into her stomach and tightened his grip, perspiration dripping off his chin and spattering her panicked face.

"Cloud! Cloud, snap out of it!" Zack roughly took a hold of Cloud's shoulders and tried to wrench him away but the blonde was three times too strong for him, empowered by mako, insanity, and grief. "Let her go! You don't even know her! Listen to me, she hasn't done anything to you!"

Amused, Tseng approached the little confrontation silently, slapping a black nightstick in one palm. He watched the struggle in mute fascination, mildly impressed by the speed at which Cloud had tackled and pinned the helpless object of his illogical fury. Crazy or not, no one could argue the guinea pig's potential. Nevertheless...

Smooth as switching off a light, Tseng brought the nightstick back and slammed it dead center into Cloud's skull, the jolt of the impact sending shivers up his arm. The blonde's grip slackened and the woman choked, crawling from beneath him. Zack caught Cloud before he slumped to the ground, cradling him by the shoulders and grinding his teeth with his own barely repressed rage.

"Are you all right, ma'am?" Tseng questioned, helping the lady to her feet and glaring daggers at the men on the floor. She choked and wheezed but managed to stand, one arm wrapped around her stomach, the other rubbing the hurt from her bruised throat. "Get this woman to the clinic!"

Finally the guards were there and two followed the order, escorting the limping Nibelheim lady away from the house as another pair took a firm hold of reeling Cloud. The blow hadn't knocked him out but the rage had disappeared just as quickly as it had come. Zack backed away, watching his friend in concern but not bothering to try and be near him again. They wouldn't have allowed it. Tseng ditched his nightstick, approached Cloud, and grabbed his chin in his hands as the guards held him roughly by the arms. "Are you planning to behave now?" he asked, "Now that you've had a bit of sense knocked back into your mako-ridden brain?"

The only response were lines of tears that broke from each half-closed eye. They dripped from his chin and splattered the worn carpet of his old home's hallway, becoming the only honest things in the entire house. Tseng glared at his bowed blonde head in disgust. "Come along," he snapped to Zack and the guards, "It's getting dark."

Cloud was dragged from the house without further incident, defeated and grieving, then Tseng gave the interior a quick glance and followed. Zack was all but ignored. Everyone knew, by now, that there would be no rebellion from him as long as Cloud was detained. He shuffled after Tseng, politely closing the door to his friend's old home behind him. There was nothing inside but memories and lies. It was same throughout the whole town. Only that mansion at the end of the street was what it had been five years before; it was the one constant, the one survivor. The mansion, himself, and Cloud.

After another half-hour of work, the airship's hold had been emptied of the research team's supplies. A snaking line of cargo-toting workers had stretched from the gangplank to the mansion for twenty minutes but now the crowd had dwindled and the pilots were ordered back onto the bridge. Tseng left with them, glad as hell to go. He abhorred this lie of a village and there were certain memories he could torment himself with if he looked for too long at the mansion, or the distantly, glowing green reactor. He stood on the bridge as the Highwind lifted off, hands clasped at his back, watching the side window for a while as the false town grew small and finally sank into the blackening horizon. Hojo was in his element again, he thought wryly. Let him have it. Tseng would take familiar Midgar, and the restrictive supervision of the Shinra building over the freedom but bad karma of the rotting mansion facility any day of the week. Good-bye, Nibelheim, and good riddance.

Greasy forehead pressed to the cool glass of a second story window, Professor Hojo watched the airship grow smaller and smaller and smaller, a glittering silver lump in the blackness of the seven o'clock sky.

"Sir?" called a timid voice and Hojo breathed an inaudible sigh. Five mere minutes to himself to readjust to the mansion would have benefitted his sanity. Too much to ask?

"What is it?" he rasped without turning around. He felt the soft-spoken assistant's nerves radiating like a stench, and he grinned. He scared everyone. Good. Unapproachable was a good way to be.

"Dr. Waters was wondering if you wouldn't like to supervise some of the clean-up in the laboratory. He knows how particular you are, sir."

"Is the man so incompetent that he can't handle a bit of redecorating?" Hojo laughed meanly, "Hell. I'll be there in a few minutes. Until then, beg him to remember his competance. It's in there somewhere, behind the oaf and the jock. He has a brain. I've seen CT scans."

"Yes, sir. And sir, it seems there was a woman injured in town by one of the specimen this evening. There being no local doctor, Mr. Tseng had her brought here. She's in a room upstairs. He had requested that you might possibly have someone look her over sometime tonight, possibly, sir."

"I love Tseng," spat Hojo sardonically, smacking his forehead back and forth softly on the window pane. "Ten years in medical school. Ten years interning. And he expects me to play medic to some Nibelheim slut. Ah, well. We must occasionally exercise humility for the betterment of ourselves, eh, Pepper?"

"Please don't call me Pepper, sir."

"Isn't that your name? It's what I've heard the others call you."

Pepper frowned carefully, scratching at his grey and black goatee. "My name is actually Wuppingham, sir."

Hojo smiled, turning finally from the window and setting his narrow back against it. "I think that I prefer Pepper, Pepper. It's endearing. I once worked on a test chimp named Pepper."

The young assistant wasn't sure how to respond, so he didn't. Hojo nearly burst out laughing. "Tell Dr. Waters I'll be downstairs shortly! Tell the group there'll be a meeting in the Library at nine pm. Off with you now and watch out for ghosts, Pepper - this mansion is filthy with them."

"Ghosts?" Pepper asked in a sickly whisper, his pointed face draining of color. Hojo sighed and rolled his eyes.

"The metaphorical kind, son. I would be in error, however, if I failed to tell you that the actors peopling this false village often complain of "real" ghosts. They say they see pale faces behind the windows here at obscene hours and they often discern the rattling of chains and the heavy, haunted report of footsteps; phantoms too, popping from the garden like groundhogs and saying Boo to anyone who dares draw too near the gates. I'm a skeptic always, but who's to say, Pepper? Who's to say? All I truly know is that there is only one monster in this town and he won't be bothering anyone. Trust me."

"A monster?" Pepper repeated, brow furrowed, "A dragon?" Hojo grinned and rolled his shoulders.

"It is nothing that any of you should be concerned about," he finally replied, "Now go and tell Dr. Waters what I said."

"Yes, sir."

Pepper popped off down the hall but his movements were hesitant and his eyes sparkling now with a fear of phantasms. There _could_ be real ghosts here. He was an analytical man but not so narrowminded that he didn't believe in things existing outside of human perception and human comprehension. This somber mansion - this entire somber town could be haunted by the dead. A plethora of experiments had been performed here years before. Many specimen sacrificed their existences for the sake of something greater. Even Hojo's own, fabled wife had given her life to produce the great warrior Sephiroth. Her story had become legend in the Shinra Science Department. Lucrecia Hojo had given her life to Shinra Manufacturing - willingly too, and you just couldn't give anymore than that no matter how much overtime you put in. It had been a pity when the young, silver-haired General had gotten himself killed four years before by the guard with the gravity-defying blonde hair.

Pepper shrugged, rounding a corner and making for the underground labs. In the end, Lucrecia was fortunate to be dead and ignorant of the ultimate meaninglessness of her sacrifice. And so, Pepper wondered practically, what the hell was the point of ever sacrificing your life for anything? Dead was dead was dead, no matter the magnificent crap you left in your wake. Lucrecia had been a sentimental idiot.

Hojo dropped his hands into the pockets of his khakis as the young assistant disappeared into the evening gloom of the hallway. There was so much work to do and suddenly he just didn't feel like doing it. Instead he felt like lingering in this achingly familiar corridor and reminiscing. Everything about the mansion was attacking him with memories he hadn't tormented himself with in years. There really were ghosts here. He could practically feel their phantom fingers tickling the backs of his ears. They would have to be disappointed. There was no time for regret or nostalgia. There were only new aspirations.

As though strolling down a city sidewalk, Hojo strolled the mansion hallway, admiring the blue light of evening pervading the inner atmosphere. He hadn't thought about her in so long. It was more comfortable that way. He did not miss her, after all. Jenova was here to fill any desire for love and understanding. And Costa Del Sol existed solely to satisfy carnal needs. There was no reason for him to miss Lucrecia at all. Yet here glowed his wedding band on his right hand. He was too lazy to take it off now, he supposed, idly twirling the golden ring round and round. His hands had swollen over the years. When he tried to slip the band off now, it wouldn't come.

"Son of a bitch."

He tugged and twisted and swore at the bastard ring, even sliding his tongue around its perimeter and slobbering over his knuckles, but it wouldn't come free of his finger. The gold glittered mockingly. Fine then, he thought venomously. To hell with you. Stay there. Your match is dead and buried and I can't sell just one of a set, can I? Worthless! Fine.

Buried and dead, just like her son. Their son.

Four years dead.

As far as Hojo knew, Sephiroth had been dead for four years, a smear of soot somewhere in the bottom of the mako reactor on Mt. Nibel. He _had_ to make that assumption. A body had never been recovered but Hojo had to assume his green-eyed, silver-haired super Soldier was dead, or he would go mad with speculation. How couldn't he be dead? He had fallen off the platform to certain immolation. Mako energy had fried him like a drop of grease on a hot sidewalk.

Twenty-five years of work had gone down a green toilet.

It had taken a long time for him to accept that. Hojo always had a hard time accepting failure. But there wasn't much that could be done about simple, bad luck. Some glimmer of good fortune had seen fit to deliver Cloud and Zack into his hands at the time and he had for a long while consoled himself with the pair. Gast was dead - that was good too. Lucrecia was gone of course, and now there was no one to interfere with his work here. Yes, he could alter Cloud Strife just as he wanted and no one gave a damn except for, perhaps, helpless Zack of the determined right hook.

The replacements were nice... They were adequate. But they just weren't Sephiroth. Standing again in the Shinra mansion made that absence in his life burn Hojo more keenly than it had during all the past four years since his death. The Professor probably could have cried if he chased the sudden unhappiness down his throat and held it there greedily. He did miss Sephiroth. He wasn't sure why, but he did. He hadn't loved him; not for one brief breath had he ever loved that maniac.

Jenova missed Sephiroth. Hojo was sure she'd wept when he'd told her the news. She never spoke to him except for the smallest of whispers in the back of his mind but he was certain that she had understood the depth of their loss. Jenova managed to communicate so much to him without common words or common sound. She impressed him, connected with him, and Hojo adored his clever little minx of an Ancient. Because she so dearly missed their son, Hojo knew he had to make her another. He couldn't bear her patient grief. Cloud would do. He wasn't Sephiroth, but he would fill the void until the other clones were completed...

Hojo all but jumped from his skin when something bumped into him in the hall. He'd been ambling with his head down and his hands behind his back, lost in his yesterdays, and now he looked up to a greasy young woman loitering as though lost in the dim corridor. She looked at Hojo as though he had three heads. "Who are you?" he asked, "You're not with the company. You're trespassing."

"I, er..." She crossed her arms and took a step backwards, looking around herself nervously, "That guy in the blue suit, ya know, with the dot between his eyes, he said I should wait up here for a doctor. I been up here a while though and no one's come. Shinra treat all its employees with this level of care? Damn, man. Some spiky-haired fruitloop tries to take my head off and I'm nice enough not to haul my happy ass to an attorney and sue and this is how you guys take care of me. If no one's going to look at my throat, I'll just leave, thanks."

She shot one last look at startled Hojo, sneered, and was about to retreat to the staircase when he clamped a cold hand on her wrist.

"Hands off the goods, four-eyes," she snapped, wrenching her arm away.  
Hojo blinked hard, removing his hand and dropping it in his pocket. "What's wrong with your throat?" he asked, coughing meekly.

"I told you - the high-strung, blonde guy tried to strangle me."

"No, you said he tried to take your head off. I would have used a chainsaw for such a maneuver, not my bare hands. We save ourselves time and trouble by being specific from the beginning." Hojo grinned in thin companionsihp and the woman began to look _really_ nervous.

"Yeah," she murmered, shuffling her feet in anticipation of another escape attempt to the stairs. The reptilian old man was creeping her out, watching her hungrily as though only the thinnest veneer of civility prevented him from snatching her up and stuffing her in a pocket of his ratty lab coat. "Well, I'm going to go. It's getting late. Nibelheim isn't the safest place to be out in at night."

"So I've heard. But you do realise I'm a doctor."

"Oh? I guess that would explain the coat."

"A professor, actually."

She crossed her scraped arms and looked skeptical. Was he playing the doctor card to impress her? Intimidate her? Oh, no, he wasn't _flirting_ with her, was he? "Ah.. what field?" she asked politely.

"I have doctorates in both medical and planetary sciences. To be honest though, I like to dip my fingers into a little bit of everything; a holistic approach, you understand. In any event, I am familiar enough with medicine to look at your throat. I can see from here that it's been bruised. Does it feel swollen? How is your breathing?"

"I-i-it's okay. Hey, m-maybe I over-reacted. That guy in the blue suit just wanted to be sure I wasn't hurt. Probably just wanted to keep me from taking legal actions against you all. Hey, I can't blame him, but you scientists really _should_ keep a tighter handle on the loonies you lead around. That blonde kid has head problems. He-- he had them insane eyes that all the army guys have. Creeped me out. Well, his eyes creeped me out _after_ I got over the fact he was trying to kill me."

"Cloud goes a little nuts sometimes," Hojo agreed laughingly. He took a step towards her. She took a step back. "But we all do occasionally. If I could coax you into entering that room there you would find the light is much more forgiving, and then I can take a proper look at your throat. So dim out here in the corridor. Old building, you realize, and half the bulbs are dead."

"Yeah... Sort of a weird place for rich Shinra scientists to set up. This is more like some schticky prop from a horror movie than a lab. Where's all the equipment anyway? You guys making Frankenstein in the basement or what?"

She laughed and Hojo laughed with her. He hurried her through the indicated doorway but at the last moment she hooked her hand around the jamb. "Really," she insisted weakly, "I think I'm okay. I''ll head out now. You can tell the guy in the suit that it all worked out okay. He really seemed concerned."

"Oh, but you cannot take these things too lightly," Hojo admonished, "Swelling could lead to an airway obstruction or you could have some potentially threatening spinal injury. Best to let me have a look at it."

"But I really think--"

"No, no, I insist. Tseng thought you should be examined and I will oblige him."  
Jenova told Hojo many things without ever using words at all. She was wise. Her advice, at times, was astonishingly _brilliant_. The Professor almost always did as she suggested and he rarely, rarely regretted it. Now, in her soundless way, she was suggesting things to him again, her presence nothing more than a ticklish feather behind one eardrum. With no difficulty, he made out every word. The advice was good; brilliant. So Hojo dropped a firm hand on the woman's shoulder, his demeanor friendly, his pale lips knotted into a smile, innocence about his person and philanthropy in his eyes. She was hesitant but he was persistant - because Jenova said it was a good idea. Because she was brilliant.

"This room right here," he murmered, guiding her through the unlit doorway,

"Right here."

The door closed behind them both.

________________________________________________________________

Shinra's false Nibelheim housed approximately two hundred and fifty citizens. Some were actors, hired hands there to play the part of townsfolk and fool those passing through into believing a madman had never torched the place years before. Others were criminals taking advantage of cheap housing. Shinra had advertised in Corel and posted flyers in the slums of Midgar, trying their damnedest to attract citizens to their city. Free housing, they offered; free homes. The poor had flocked with their hands out and as a result, the rebuilt town was populated with thieves and destitute lowlifes. You just didn't walk the streets alone after dark. It wasn't healthy. A knife to your throat or a whispered threat under the glow of a streetlight, and then you'd find yourself suddenly missing a wallet.

The cobblestone road glistened beneath the moon. Old sneakers slunk over the pavement, their owner intently watching the upper floors of the black edifice perched at the end of the village's main drag. He was nervous. He knew how stupid it was to be out this late. He could feel things watching from the alleys; eyes even colder than those of the rats gnawing each other's tails in the garbage bins. His imagination tormented him and his dark experiences with nocturnal Nibelheim crept into his memories, but he couldn't go home without his sister. Fifteen minutes ago he had found her missing from their little house and their neighbour, a chain-smoking old woman with enormous, flapping upper arms, had spun to him a little story about an airship, and a crazed kid with weird hair and luminescent eyes. Something about Shinra too. That last part had been most alarming. All he knew about Shinra was they imprinted their red and white diamond seal at the top of his paycheck every two weeks. He worked for them, yes, but he hadn't seen a face from that company in nearly a year. He'd never even been to Midgar. No, he was only a penniless stage actor from Wutai, lured to Nibelheim by a very enthusiastic guy with bright red hair and a blue suit who'd wandered into town one evening exuding purpose. Reno had been his name and he had introduced himself as a recruiter. He'd learned that the actor's name was Chet, and he had treated Chet at Turtle's Paradise that night, inebriating him so thoroughly that before Chet knew what was happening he woke up in coach class on a plane bound for Nibelheim, his sister, his dog, and all his earthly possessions stacked around him. A note stuffed in his breast pocket had read:

Yo Chet, you're working for Shinra now. Be good-- Reno

All things considered, Chet had not minded. Success had steadily eluded him in Wutai, with only a few mildly embarrassing dog food commercials boasting the sandy-haired, sleepy-eyed young actor as a background extra. His agent had abandoned him after the last one. His girlfriend had denounced him as a Go Nowhere, dumping him for his agent. They were somewhere together now, Chet knew, doing something fabulously exciting. But at least Chet got himself out of Wutai.

He was still a Go Nowhere. But now a company named Shinra was paying him to keep still. That was an improvement. Things were looking up.

Or they had been. Now his stupid sister Sara had disappeared and Chet had no choice but to creep along this moon-flecked road at the mercy of muggers, even his worn and bandaged sneakers alarmingly loud against the cobbles. Stupid Sara, where had she gone? Why had some freaky blonde kid attacked her? And what the hell were a bunch of Shinra goons doing in Nibelheim? Months had passed without a word from that Reno guy or any other smugly amused men in blue suits, but now a giant airship had arrived full of Shinra scientists? Oh, they had better not be planning to shut the production down! The money was too good. Chet had never kept a job for this long.

The moon was a white smile up in the corner of the sky, sickly pale but razor sharp against transparent clouds. The streets were laced with a shimmering, milky-white light. This did not better illuminate the way so much as it made the night seem blacker around it. A foul breeze blew off the mountain, bitterly cold but wet too, some northern storm lurking behind it. All it ever bloody did in Nibelheim was rain, Chet thought. The village was always wet and mildewed and slushy. The cheap lumber in the houses had began to rot almost immediately after the company finished construction. Perhaps Nibelheim had been a quaint haven for miners and reactor technicians a decade ago, but its current incarnation smelled like shit.

Chet nudged the mansion's rusted gate open fearlessly. He had been living in this stinking hole of a village long enough to be accustomed to the macabre entity of the Shinra mansion. It was so depressingly eerie that it could be funny if you looked at it just right. And that was how Chet looked at it. The mansion tried too hard to scare him. Whenever a thunder storm woke him at three in the morning and he'd wander out of his bedroom, look casually out the front window, and spy the mansion crouched at the end of the street, silouhetted by lightening, he thought it was hilarious. Hell, the whole deal was corny! He couldn't be afraid of the mansion if he was too busy laughing at it.

He'd never actually gone up to it though.

Laughter grew more difficult the closer he drew.

Dead grass and thriving weeds crunched under his feet as he traversed the overgrown path leading up to the rotting front door. The building was decaying like a corpse. Paint peeled, the eaves sagged, even the gate was nearly rusted off its hinges. Chet wondered how old the dump was and who'd built it. They called it the Shinra mansion but what did that mean? Did they mean to tell him that the Shinra Company had built this pile of crap? Ha, that was just crazy. Some old guy musta knocked off so Shinra bought the place. And now they were peopling it with some research team of psychotic scientists and doctors. And for some really, really insane reason, his sister Sara was inside! Why?

Chet cursed to himself, the cuffs of his jeans catching in the sharp, spiky weeds. He clomped through the untended lawn until he noticed how quiet the whole place was and then he paused, pulling his elbows close and trying to tiptoe. It was senselessly quiet considering all of the people his fat neighbour had claimed marched in here earlier this evening. Chet backpedalled a few steps, craning his neck back to try and make out the topmost windows. It was more difficult now that he was so close to the building.

No lights on though.

Only half-past eight and no lights were on. They couldn't all be asleep. Nobody home? Where was Sara then?

"I'm gonna ring her neck when I find her," he muttered, shivering in a chill breeze,

"I'm gonna ship her back to Wutai, I swear it! She couldn't have left a note? She couldn't have told the guy she didn't want to go with him because it'd make her little brother worry? Is she really inside at all? How the hell do I find her?!"

The wind let up quite suddenly. Chet quieted his rant, sure he heard something behind the bluster of howling Mt. Nibel. He took a step backwards, still looking up-- then cried out when he tripped over an uneven spot in the path and fell back on his ass.

He heard something! He heard something that made his heart pound blood in his ears. He heard something curl like a shy petal from the the top of this ridiculous mansion, hop on the back of the breeze and dive through his head like a nightmare. Screams. He heard screams. And they sounded like Sara's.

________________________________________________________________ 

Hojo wiped his hands on his pants after softly shutting the door behind him. He took off towards the labs, smiling.

________________________________________________________________

"Shit... Z-zack... Where are we, man?"

" _Ssh._ "

Zack moved a finger to his lips and Cloud nodded, ignorant of all save the knowledge it was best to obey his friend without question. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, newly awoken from a dose of potent sedatives. The stupid drugs laid a blanket over his brain and he hated them more than almost any other aspect of his imprisonment. His motions sluggish and trembling, he pushed himself to a sitting position, found a wall, and scooted towards it, laying his back against cool concrete. Wherever they were, it was dark - nearly tar black - and cold and wet and stinking. When the dizziness passed he forced his eyes open and observed the new cell more closely. It was roughly seven feet by seven feet. The ceiling was low and there were faux clouds on it - black blooms of creeping mildew and water stains. Brackish water was pooled in the corners. A few roaches lay in it, curled up dead on their backs.

"Shinra mansion," Zack explained _sotto voce_ in his friend's ear, "We're in the basement library. They knocked you out after you jumped that lady. You okay?"

"I think so. What lady?"

"Do you remember this place at all?"

"The basement library? I... I never went into the library, I don't think."

"Maybe not." Zack wondered, sometimes, why he bothered asking Cloud about his recollections of the past few years at all. He never remembered. The whole trip to Nibelheim four years ago was a blank to him. Trauma, mako infusions, injury or all three were the cause of his failing memory, Zack conjectured, knowing nothing with any real certainty. He touched his friend lightly on the shoulder and gestured to a single square of white light glowing in the opposite wall. Cloud looked confused a moment, then climbed to his feet and made his way towards it.

"We're in a cell in the lab," whispered Zack, "I think they're having a meeting out there."

_"They?"_

Cloud gripped the rim of the window with his fingertips and hung heavily from it, peering outside and blinking fiercely to wake himself up. It was difficult to see anything at all in the badly lit library; lots of books, gleaming computer towers, the usual tanks, tubes, and machines. Needles. Torture equipment he had grown alarmingly accustomed to after so long and yet the cold, steel lines still cut his eyes and weakened his knees. The equipment wasn't what Zack had wanted him to see though.

Twenty feet from their cell had been erected a four-sided table and nine scientists sat about it industriously. Documents littered the scratched surface beneath their knobby, drumming fingers. Someone had set up a whiteboard on a tripod, but no one was paying attention to the carefully plotted itinerary on it. In the lowered lights they looked like a coven of colluding vampires, hissing about accountability and sterilization and pest control. Cloud wondered if they knew that he was watching them. They probably did. They probably didn't care.  
"What're we doing here, Zack?" he whispered, staring fixedly at the gathered scientists, "The Shinra building is bad enough but back here in the mansion?

What's going on?"

"I don't know, man." Zack stretched his arms behind his head, trying to find a comfortable position against the wet concrete. He failed. "Listen in, see if you can pick up any clues. Just behave though, all right? I hate to watch them beating on you when you get violent. You start fights at the drop of a hat."

"Can't help it," Cloud said softly, "Can't help it."

He rested his chin on the window sill and tried to follow Zack's advice. Zack gave great advice. Cloud could see through the dark easily and Zack knew it. He knew Cloud heard even better than he saw. He was the most talented snoop of the pair so he concentrated now, listening, loathe to disappoint.

"It's really only a matter of time, sir..."

Cloud had counted nine scientists; a regular ballteam of bastards. The shortest of them sat at the head of the table and Cloud didn't need his mako-enhanced senses to identify him. Hojo's bent silhouette - broken by sharp elbows, a protruding brow, and his arachnid hands - was unmistakeable. Cloud was frightened of Hojo. Hojo made it all happen. He was the source of suffering in the Shinra laboratories; the god of Cloud's small, dark, pain-filled world. He was a spiteful, cruel God but his labcoated little angels had the potential to be just as bad.

Cloud had a passing familiarity with most of Hojo's team. The one speaking now was a newer addition however, and the blonde wasn't certain of his name. He was a familiar Type though - young, enthusiastic, dreamy, mildly sycophantic and ready to pander to Hojo and lick his shoe soles for attention. "A matter of time, sir," he was murmuring, shuffling a stack of papers, "That's what it was at the beginning. Myself and the rest of the JP staff want to congratulate you now by officially declaring that 'matter of time' has matured to 'the time is now!' The wait is over and our preparations are complete. President Shinra is about to be very much rewarded for his patience and his generous funding."

"Yes, yes," Hojo rattled dismissively, splayed in a high-backed leather office chair. He waved the young scientist away as though swatting a fly. "Thank you for the congratulatory rhetoric, Watts, but it's a waste of our time. The last four years have been a _waste_ of our time. We were in possession of the perfected specimen and then we were robbed of it. What we are about to recreate can never be as flawless as the original creation and I therefore see no reason to beat ourselves about the backs in a congratulatory fashion. This is not a clone which we are about to complete but... an imperfect second attempt. That is all we have. Don't piss in your pants over it, Watts."

The young scientist looked suddenly and terribly uncomfortable, ducking his head sheepishly. He sat back down in his seat and hid behind his papers. Hojo eyeballed him and continued.

"I would prefer a few more practical reports, gentlemen. Are the tanks prepped? I know there were some concerns about the power adapters. Is everything networked? Waters, have you sterilized the tank we will be using for Jenova?"

"What? What tank? Professor Hojo, why do we need a tank?"

That was a familiar voice. Cloud knew Dr. Waters very well. He was famous in the Shinra labs for his ceaseless, strident, bitter disapproval of everything Professor Hojo practised or proposed. It was common in the labs to hear the two of them snapping and sniping at each other over everything from funds allocation to how to organize files. Tonight, predictably, Dr. Waters dripped venom.  


Hojo stared down his pointed nose at the brute, sneering as though he'd caught wind of something awful. "Dr. Waters," he began as condescendingly as possible, resting his two pale hands on the tabletop. "Despite the delusions of leadership that haunt and obsess your laughably minute intellect, I am the one in charge of this project. We require a five-hundred gallon tank with filters and an outlet to a Sorbes' scope. We will be relocating Jenova to the facilities here as the mountain reactor has become unstable. You will therefore prepare a holding tank. I want all necessary precautions taken to ensure that it is absolutely incorruptable and worthy to receive so important a specimen. Do you understand me?"

Waters looked more like a professional wrestler than a man of science. Six and half feet tall, sinewy and thick like a lion, you could see the power rippling beneath Dr. Waters' ridiculously ill-fitting lab coat. When he wasn't disputing Hojo or researching his own pedestrian theories, he was on the Shinra Company football team. Waters carried that competitive attitude with him off the field. "It's too dangerous a venture and I say it is a waste of effort," he declared boldly, looking his superior dead in the eye. The flesh around his thickly shaped lips trembled with repressed annoyance. "The tanks in the reactor are infinitely better tuned to perform as we need. Anything we manage to duplicate here, in the laboratory, is going to be inferior to the sort of performance we could achieve inside the reactor's facilities. The Jenova creature is better synchronized with that equipment, Professor. We should conduct the final phase there, just as you told President Shinra we would."

Hojo grinned, sat forward, and slapped his chin in his hand. "Dr. Waters, you are acting under the mistaken impression that I asked for your advice. I did not. The equipment in the Nibelheim reactor is in a shameful state of disrepair. It has not been maintenanced in nearly thirty years. As if that were not reason enough to disregard its use to us in our work, Sephiroth partially destroyed half the facilities looking for his mother. President Shinra has given us money enough only to restore Jenova's life support mechanisms. He did not care to give us gil enough to repair the analytical devices. So, dear Dr. Waters, I ask that you shut your mouth and do as I say. Do not question me again. We will be bringing Jenova here to the mansion so that we can conduct the infusion in a civilised, functional, laboratory environment."

"I still disagree," Waters mumbled, crossing his thick arms over his broad chest, "The results will be substandard with this half-assed, unsynchronized equipment..."

"Of course you disagree," Hojo snapped, tapping his fingers on the table and running his eyes over the pages of a report, "It is in your nature to disagree. I expect no less from you."

"Professor, will we be visiting the reactor tomorrow then?" another doctor asked timorously. Hojo half-shut his eyes and nodded.

"The sooner the better, so yes. Tomorrow morning at half-past nine, I want the team assembled at the front gates. Boots and warm clothes. The hike is treacherous."

"I don't see why we have to carry out such unpleasant business ourselves," Waters complained beneath his breath, "This is the business of Turks and Soldiers. Shinra does not pay us to hike up the sides of mountains." Of course, asking Turks or Soldiers for aid would have meant the President prematurely discovering Hojo's intentions with Jenova. That would never do.

"It's true," another scientist piped up, "It does seem ridiculous. I mean..."

"You'll see this is for the best. Each and every one of you shall see." Hojo rose stiffly to his feet, gesturing grandly. "You'll see the price of failure and you'll see the grandeur of that thing we've failed. You'll see Jenova as Sephiroth saw her and you'll understand, perhaps, why he felt so inclined to serve her."

_And why I feel so inclined_

"Anyway," Hojo continued awkwardly, "It would be foolhardy to trust the transport of a specimen as fragile and as important as Jenova to common Soldiers and ham-handed Turks. They would throw her in a beer cooler and haul her through the mountain pass with dangerous irreverence. We know how to treat Jenova and can ensure her relocation does not disturb or traumatize the specimen anymore than necessary. We will handle our own chores. Does every one of you understand? _Do you hear me?!_ "

Hojo's voice had risen to a low roar by the end and the assembled scientists regarded him uneasily. This wasn't the first time they had heard him wax insane. Only the new guy, earlier chastised for wasting time, seemed to be waiting for a coworker to burst out laughing or for Hojo to turn to him and wink.

"You sound positively infatuated with the creature," Waters sneered, winning a few nervous chuckles. "You're certain you don't want to go up there by yourself tomorrow, Professor Hojo? Have yourself a little alone time with the Ancient?"

The scientists laughed, each one of them, as much to relieve themselves of anxious tension than to let Dr. Waters know what a funny guy he was. Hojo remained teetering on his feet, staring at the nine men with icy insouciance. They always laughed. He was glad to be a source of amusement for them. Everyone needed to crack the occasional smile. They wouldn't be laughing after tomorrow, after they saw what they were about to do to Cloud Strife. True, in many ways Cloud would be nothing compared to what Sephiroth had been, but in certain other ways he'd be a whole lot more.

"Thank you for the offer, Dr. Waters," Hojo answered softly after the room had quieted. He could compose himself so well if he really put forth the effort. He had no reason to get upset over what these cretins thought. They didn't know. Jenova did not speak to them. They were not so fortunate. "Yes, thank you, but I think you all deserve to see. It is a pity that we cannot conduct the actual procedure there, but we will manage. I'm certain of it."

Hojo took his seat again, folding his arms over his chest and allowing the rest of the team to discuss the more mundane aspects of the Project amongst themselves. They were already eager to forget the Professor and the way he thought of the Jenova specimen as a living, thinking entity. They all "knew" that the monster was dead - alive only in a technical sense. They did not believe there was any real sentience there; no true consciousness. Let them believe that, Hojo thought viciously. Let them delude themselves for as long as they will, but not I. _I know!_

"...yes, and we have had a somewhat difficult time finding space for all the equipment. This facility is hardly adequate to our needs. I say, it is something more like a tomb than a laboratory."

Hojo looked up sharply from his wild thoughts and raised an eyebrow at the speaker. "Blame President Shinra," he muttered, "The concept of this mansion tickled his fancy thirty years ago and so he allowed his architects and contractor to run wild. He trusted their opinion over the late Professor Gast's."

"I saw a few likely rooms in the corridor outside that appeared vacant," Pepper suggested brightly. Hojo wrenched his head around in surprise, not having realized the squirrelly little assistant was in attendance. "Couldn't we set up a slide room in one? Another might do as a storage vault for the cultures and drug cabinet after a thorough sterilization--"

"There's nothing of interest in those rooms," Hojo said too quickly. He sat forward and shook his head. "Nothing. Leave them be. They were ah... contaminated years ago, and are hazardous to enter. Leave them be."

"Contaminated?" Waters echoed dubiously. He swept a thick hand back through his mop of brown hair, "By what?"

"Does it matter? I told you not to question me, Waters! I'm already weary of your brainless belligerence! Do you want me to have you shipped back to Midgar?!"  
Waters grit his teeth but said nothing more. He was probably one of the only scientists who dared look Hojo in the eyes when he spoke to him. And because of this, he discomfited Hojo as much as he angered him. The Professor shot to his feet and marched over to Waters, shouting further threats in his face. Inside the darkened cell, Zack sat up with a start at the sudden commotion. He'd been starting to doze.

"..eh? That Waters and Hojo going at each other's throats again?" he asked around a yawn, "Man oh man, does that ever get old."

"I think it's kind of funny," Cloud opined, afraid to turn from the window and miss possible fisticuffs. His spikey blonde head blocked the light, beams of white breaking around his hair. Zack squinted as he looked up at him. "It's nice to hear _someone_ telling Hojo off, even if Waters does always back down. Man, I don't back down. I tell Hojo to fuck off till my throat's sore when I can't outright try to strangle him. I _never_ back down. Neither do you."

"Well, we don't have to worry about Hojo firing us, do we?" Zack asked, grinning, "Hell, I wish he would. Come on, Cloud, they're just going to snap at each other all night. Why don't you get some sleep? I'd love to stay up all night and insult Hojo with you but all the traveling today's worn me out."

"Sleep?" Cloud said the word as though it were new to him. He listened to the voices calm outside and watched Hojo finally move away from his rival and return to his seat. The meeting picked up again - boring talk of procedures and calibrations. "I don't want to go to sleep, Zack. The sooner I do, the sooner I wake up and it's morning. I'm a little concerned about what they're going to do to us tomorrow."

"Who knows what that'll be though, pal? They haven't told us shit."

Cloud put his back to the door, crossing his arms and heaving a hot sigh. "Yeah, and that's why I'm concerned."

"Heh. Well, after the crap we've endured for four years, what more can they really do? Honestly? Can anything be worse than the injections? The immersion tanks? The endurance exams? Fuck me, but nothing's worse than those. Tomorrow, whatever they're planning, will at least be something new. I'm not concerned. Seriously not relishing the thought of the hike to that reactor though."

"Me neither. I don't like the mountains. Bad memories there."

"Yeah... for me too. Watch my back for me, eh?"

"You watch mine."

"Deal."

Zack gave a sleepy salute and rolled over onto his side to face the damp-eaten wall. A few blankets had been tossed in after them and he wadded one up under his head, trying to clear his mind. Cloud stared at his back a while and watched him fall asleep, all the time trying to keep his own eyes open. The voices of the scientists were a soporific though. They droned on and on at his back. Hojo's menacing whine occasionally rose and startled him but otherwise the cell was peaceful. It was quieter, even, than their rooms in the Shinra building; there the massive air conditioners roared to life every half-hour, and the restless shudders and moans of specimen pierced even the foot and a half of insulation in every wall. The Shinra laboratory was cold, sterile, and loud - loud even when it was quiet. Here, Cloud nearly felt home again. He was, after all; home in Nibelheim, even in this concrete cell with his mother dead and the town a facsimile and all the villagers strangers. Nevertheless he was home in the shadows of the mountains. If he closed his eyes and reached his uncanny hearing out as far as he could, he made out the reassuring breath of the sky blowing in the mansion's eaves, just as it used to whistle in the eaves of his house. If he closed his eyes and concentrated on those winds, he could imagine that he was a kid again, standing at his window, his mother's hand on his shoulder and his eyes pointed towards the stars.

Smiling faintly in spite of himself, Cloud slumped against the door. He knew he shouldn't fall asleep but the possibility of dreams enticed him. Maybe he would dream of Tifa and his mother before the nightmare began the next morning.

________________________________________________________________

"Quarter after eleven, sir," Pepper reported, looking at his wristwatch, "Cloud and Zack are asleep. I just checked on them."

Hojo grunted, one of his more polite indications that he didn't give a damn. Pepper shrugged helplessly, rising from his seat and gathering his reports into a neat stack of creamy documents. Looking mildly murderous, Hojo gestured for his team to depart, scourging them with a threatening hand. The scientists all eagerly obeyed, only too glad to retreat after three hours of exertion; tolerating a skittish, irritable madman took a lot out of a person. Only one man lagged behind. Dr. Waters clamped this thick fingers on the back of his chair and bored into Hojo's averted face with both beady eyes. He looked ready to introduce the old man's head to a brick. Hojo felt attention on him and smirked, moving a fist to his mouth to hide his inexplicable merriment.

"Is there something I might help you with, Dr. Waters?"

The well-built man hadn't been expecting his superior to actually speak and Hojo was secretly thrilled to watch him flinch. He smirked harder, feeling his face stretch away from his nostrils, and leaned back in his chair. Nice chair this, he thought absently. Shinra could do luxury right, every now and again.

"It's nothing," Waters finally answered. He flexed his hands over the chair now, tensing his knuckles and picking lint off the cushions. He turned to leave but the conflict was unmistakeable in his face; it glittered in his eyes and set his liver-coloured lower lip to quivering. Hojo recognised it. Rebellion. No surprise at all. Hojo giggled to himself.

"You're going to be a problem," he declared bemusedly, unnerving Waters further and inspiring a hasty shake of his head.

"No. When I do give voice to my opinions it is simply my attempt to aid in the success of this project. I will admit, Professor, that I do not like wastes; wastes of money, time, effort, or life. I feel that some of the things we will be engaging in here will cause great waste. I have to express my opinion."

"Even if your opinion is stupid?" Hojo clarified, smiling.

"No such thing as a bad opinion, Professor."

"Ha! The man who coined that phrase had a lot of bad opinions and had to find something to say in his defense. Well, Waters. Well, well. We shall see how you work out. But remember what I said - a snap of my fingers and you'll be back labeling tissue samples in Midgar. I know that you are not fond of me or my work with Jenova. Fair enough. I wouldn't spit on you if you were on fire. I am your superior however, and the Jenova Project and everything associated with it belong to me. It is the crux of the Shinra R&D department currently and you would be a fool to separate yourself from it simply because you do not like the way that I operate. Neither shall you attempt to snatch my Project away from me after thirty years, as Strife snatched Sephiroth. Jenova will not die with that man. I am reviving her and I am reviving the Jenova Project!"

Waters crossed his arms and shuffled his feet uneasily. Great, he thought. The lunatic was raving again.

Breathing heavy, Hojo remembered himself suddenly, wiping sweat from his forehead and gritting his teeth. He could grow so unexplainably aggravated so quickly. He was as bad as Cloud. "Get out of my eyes, Waters," he snarled, "I'll see you all by the gates in the morning. Do not be tardy. You hardly need an addition to your already lengthy list of faults."

Waters was ready to knock the little bastard through the wall but he held his temper and did as commanded, sweeping from the gloom of the library like a white-coated titan. He left the chamber cold and empty behind him. Hojo sat at the table for a while, staring through the darkness at the old tanks. If he held his breath, he could hear the even respirations of his little patients, Zack and Cloud, lost in blissful slumber in one of the rear storage rooms. It was a rather inappropriate cage but they had to work with what they'd been given. Ah, well. Hojo had not heard them complain.

Clearing the confrontation with Waters from his thoughts, the Professor stood stiffly from the table, his backbone popping in three places with audible snaps, like a child's neck breaking. The laboratory seemed spun of glass; he feared the reports of his aging bones would send it shattering around him. The barrier of thirty years was almost tangible here. A coat of dust, a layer of cobwebs.... Time was nothing more than a little dirt over the equipment and books. If he brushed it all away, Hojo wondered if he would find Lucrecia somewhere here, recording the daily data and waiting for him to turn in for the night.

He wouldn't though. He'd only dig up more dust. The past was dead and the players buried. He was the last man standing.

________________________________________________________________

Night grew blacker over Nibelheim. Carnivores fed in the mountains. Things were dying in the darkness.

Hojo finally trudged towards bed when both hands on the old hallway clock had settled comfortably onto the twelve. The mansion creaked around him as he walked, the worn hem of his coat susserating softly against his pantslegs. It was a dead noise, like windblown leaves in autumn. The gale outside mimicked the sound, heavy and dolorous. He heard it sobbing through the walls and saw the things it carried silhouetted black against a pale yellow moon, all visible through the large picture window hovering above the stairs. Like great buzzing insects, the leaves blew black against the glass - tap tap tap - and Hojo shivered. He was just cold, he told himself. This mountain town, despite a history of fire and hell, really was amazingly cold. He wrapped his arms around himself and descended the stairs with careful deliberance, eyes distant.

He looked up.

A sudden sound reached him from the foyer, in the darkness. Likely one of the team; some stooge ignoring his advice and scuffling around in the darkness instead of turning in for the night. Was he huddled in a corner with his hot little lips pressed against a cellphone, talking pretty to a girlfriend back in Midgar? Hojo had to smile to himself. Waters aside, none of the team were bad sorts really. It was the Professor himself who was the bastard; the rest had merely fallen in with the wrong leader.

Bringing his chilly white hands to his mouth and blowing hot breath over icy fingertips, Hojo left the staircase and stepped into the spacious foyer, the space green and dusty in the moonlight. He paused. He turned about, then turned about again, racing his tired black eyes over the wrenching familiarity. How even the tacky furniture and the bad art envigorated his memory. The silent grace of the old building, perfectly lit by the light of a grinning yellow moon, took him back thirty years in a single breath - in a heartbeat. He was struck by it so completely that he couldn't make himself continue on to his bedroom. He wished he could snap a photo of this place, just as it was, just now. The past was so tangibly thick in Hojo's thoughts that he felt absolutely mad with it, and had to run a hand over his face to feel the lines there.

Here! he thought to himself, quickly laying that hand on the bannister of the staircase instead. Here she would descend from the second floor, papers clutched to her breasts, those wispy strands of brown in her face and he rushed to greet her and take the burden; push the hair from her eyes; say hello with a kiss.

Yes...

Incensed now, he turned quickly about and nearly ran to the front door, arm extending as though he meant to tear it open. Instead he resting trembling digits on the knob, his lips parted.

Here the Turks would enter after their walk around the perimeter, and they had stood just inside the doorway, whispering. They would talk and they'd laugh and they'd do all they could to keep from coming inside for as long as they were able because they had hated it inside the mansion. They hated the scientists. They hated Hojo. He remembered.

He moved to a room just off the foyer, the doorway obscured in black shadows. His eyes were feverish, rimmed with tears and red.

He had seen him and her go into this alcove often, and had never really thought much of it. Towards the end, those last few months, the Turk had not seemed to mind retiring to the inside of the mansion as much as his partner or chief. And why? Why..? Because he knew she was waiting for him.

"Vincent."

Two shaking hands clutching his face, Hojo turned, averting his gaze from the shadowed room and looking instead to the winding dusty staircase. A figure stood there, motionless as a statue at the very base of the segmented ascent. The yellow moon smiled behind her, a crooked arch with one end piercing her shoulder.

"Who's there?" Hojo demanded. He rewrapped his arms about himself, shivering in the cold, squinting through the dust and greenish light. Scintillating motes circled his head in unrelenting swarms, catching the moonglow then dying away. The figure did not answer him.

Hojo took a slow step forward, eyes narrowing, trying to see past the stranger's eerie veil. She was a woman obviously, her white garments tightly wrapping her shapely figure like a gorgeous, shimmering shroud. Waves of soft brown hair - so reflective it was almost transparent - poured over her shoulders and, with a desire he didn't understand, Hojo wanted to run forward and plunge his hands into those thick, chestnut locks, embrace her bowed shoulders, and whisper a kiss across the lips behind the veil.

"Lucrecia?"

Stupid to say. Stupid to say. Stupid to say.

She was dead.

"You're j-joking," he stammered, not daring to draw any closer. "Some delusion. Damned mansion is putting ideas into my head."

He said the words aloud so the thing would make no mistake regarding his opinions on it but, much to Hojo's dismay, the declaration caused neither the apparition's departure nor dissolution. It remained, staring at the front door, perhaps expecting the return of the Turks that would never come. The Professor felt a knot of nausea in the pit of his stomach.

"Dead," he whispered, "You're dead, dear heart. You've been dead for nearly thirty years. Don't pull this shit on me."

Hojo wanted to escape. He began walking with slow, even steps to his bedroom on the opposite side of the foyer but he knew he would have to pass the foot of the stairs to get there. He'd have to pass through her gaze. If he could only see her face and know what expression was there.

"You're not real," he insisted, stepping gingerly past her. She didn't flinch nor acknowledge him when he moved between her and the doorway. Staring forlornly at the closed door, she remained a still spectre of expectant, white anguish. "Not real. Get away from me."

"Vincent..."

She whispered that name and it tore a hole through Hojo's heart. He halted, only a few feet away and exulted as his fear transformed into a sudden simmering rage. He nearly bolted forward to snatch at her shoulders and shake her until her head snapped back, the crack of her neck breaking signaling an end to his frustration. But he didn't.

"You have no right to say that name to me."

As though to mock him, defy him, she said the word again.

"Vincent."

"He is as d-dead as you are. At least he has the good sense to remain so."

"Vincent..."

  1. Terrible for him to hear it now. She had screamed that name for hours as she had laid dying, filling the laboratory with howls and ululations of terror and pain until the name became only a nonsense wail representing the unbearable sensation of her unfair death. It was a knife in Hojo's head to hear it again now. Never - not once on that wretched night those long years ago - had she called for her husband. Not the meanest utterance had she spared him, denying him even the dubious mercy of her hatred and blame. All she'd held thoughts of was that Turk who already lay buried. She'd only cried for him.



"He was already gone then," the Professor rasped hatefully, "He'd been destroyed in his half-assed attempt to steal you away from me - and you never knew! You tried to hate him. You tried to believe what I told you but you never did and I _knew_ that you knew. I knew!"

"Vincent--"

"He won't come for you!"

Hojo wanted to strangle the cloyingly naive, faithless, ignorant, self-destructive slut. He approached her quickly, the bloodshot whites visible around both his black irises and his breathing labored so that he was blasting hot air and saliva in the veiled face. He couldn't make out her features, but this was she. This was her voice. Her body..!

"You aren't going to haunt me _now_ , after thirty years-- do you understand me? I buried thoughts of you a long time ago and this mansion is not going to exhume them! Run away, little mouse! Return to the lover you left in hell. That's where he is. He died in his box years ago. Years ago! If I doubted that, I would have returned long before now to finish the job and grant he mercy he hardly fucking deserved.

The wind picked up in the foyer. Somewhere in the logical recesses of his brain, Hojo knew that there were no windows open in the mansion. He had ordered them all shut and locked. Yet here swelled a bitter, frigid wind, lashing his eyes and spectacles with his thinning black forelock and beating him with the skirts of his dirty coat. They did not disturb the phantom. She stared through the madly wheeling dust and the eerie green light at to the door, her placid veil a mystery, her curvaceous figure frozen with a patience her husband had long ago accused her of lacking. Her hair was still and straight and luminescent. She seemed carved from marble.

"To bed," Hojo mussitated drunkenly, peeling hair from his face. He turned, trembling, and with a shaky resolve he sought out the door to his bedroom. A thin white hand hovered above the doorknob, hesitating. The tarnished brass gleamed at him like an eye, and for a moment, Hojo was terrified to touch it. It seemed like it might burn him, or split horizontally to reveal a mouthful of fangs. Oh, what a coward he was! How insane his genius made him! He spoke with an apparition of his dead wife and feared a doorknob. He was as crazy as they said he was in Midgar.

"Fine then, I'll be crazy," he told the woman. He didn't look at it but he could _feel_ the phantom lingering at the foot of the stairs, staring at the door, wearing a blurry mask instead of a face. He had to get away from it. It was too powerful a reminder of his sins-- no, his sloppiness. His past errors in judgment.

"Vincent. . . "

"He's not going to come!"

Fuck the scary doorknob!

Hojo flung himself against the dusty wood and the door swung open. The darkness of the bedroom inside was almost as intimidating as the white figure of the ghost in the foyer. Terror that he recognised or terror that he could only guess at... which was worse?

He shivered at the threshhold, poised between two frights. The figure at the foot of the stairs made up his mind for him. She tilted her head as slowly as a wisp of down settling on a blanket, turning to face Hojo with such methodical elegance that the Professor wasn't certain she moved at all; she seemed only like a series of film frames advancing through a broken projector. When he did at last realize he had become the object of her expectations, Hojo felt it like a hand around his throat. He clawed at his adam's apple, wheezing. Her blue eyes were like crystal, refracting and refining the peculiar spectrum of his betrayal.

"Don't look at me like that," he whispered hoarsely so that she could ignore the plea and continue her relentless stare. He took a step backwards, retreating into the black bedroom as she burnt brighter. How reproachful she was; such anger; but most unbearable of all was the hurt. Her Hojo had betrayed her. Hojo had killed her.

"I did not! You weren't important!"

She scrutinized him, the ethereal winds only a subtle, moody disturbance of her skirts and hair. Hojo was paralyzed.

"Jenova," he rasped, "She's all that matters. You were human - transient. Mortals! That made you expendible, no matter how much I loved you. Don't you see? Jenova said you weren't important... I didn't want to do any of those things... Believe me, 'Crecia. Believe me!"

He was almost sobbing now, knocking his glasses askew and crushing his sleeve into his eyes. Why would she only say the one name? Couldn't she say his? Couldn't she pretend she gave a damn, the way she had decades before? She had died. She'd gotten off so much easier than him.

"Vincent."

No, she was too petty for _that_. A creature of the past, she had to dwell on what had been, having no idea of everything he had endured since she had shuffled out of his life and off of this mortal coil. She had to remind him of how he'd killed his wife and murdered her lover. She had to keep up with that damned name.

"Vincent."

But now... Was it a plea now? Neither pain nor grief seemed to shape the two syllables as she whispered them. Hojo unbowed his head to examine her, tears streaking his cheeks. That word was a threat now.

"Vincent."

The word was a promise.

"I don't understand," Hojo murmured, looking out on her now from his unlit bedroom. His hand strayed to the edge of the door and he wondered if she would stay outside if he were to close it; or would she glide inside, insubstantial, and face him while trapped with no where to run and hide from her reproach? He couldn't bear the thought of being cornered in a closed room, alone with a dead woman and that fucking name.

"Vincent."

"Means nothing to me," he choked, "He's as dead as you are."

"Vincent will come."

"He didn't come thirty years ago, you vindictive little bitch. He won't be coming now! Leave me the hell alone!"

His hand itched, begged to be allowed to close the door. But he was so god-awful frightened that it wouldn't be able to keep her away. He was indescribably glad when without warning, without another word or silent threat, the figure began to fade away. As though it had been nothing more than a beam of moonlight, it was now as though a cloud moved forward to cover it and send her back to the sky. Hojo was left alone in the doorway to his room, staring at an empty foyer. Sobbing brokenly but scared out of his wits, he fell inside, slamming the door shut. He hid beneath his bedsheets and prayed to Jenova rather than God. He figured she had a tighter hold of his soul.

_________________________________________________________________ 

Zack thought he heard something crying.

Grimacing at the stiffness that came with sleeping on a concrete floor, he pushed himself up onto his elbows and tried to remember where he was. Cage, of course. A library, a lab. The mansion. Nibelheim. Cripes.

The cage was almost pitch black and it hurt Zack's tired eyes to try and make anything out at all. The only visible thing was the lit top of Cloud's spikey head. He was leaning on the door again, looking out the window and blocking the scant light from outside. "Cloud..." Zack called softly, running a hand over his face and rubbing his eyes, "Cloud, why are you crying? Are you all right?"

Cloud turned from the window. His features were drawn and pale. He was trembling all over with excitement. "It's not me," he hissed, barely able to steady his voice. He waved Zack over with an eager hand. "The lady outside-- she was here, then left. Went out into the hall. I swear, Zack, she was a ghost! I swear it!"

"Ghost?" Zack whispered dubiously, "Man, you had a dream is all. Go back to sleep..."

"She seemed so sad," Cloud mumbled to himself, ignoring his friend and turning again to the window. Zack rolled onto his side, fitfully pulling a dirty sheet over his bare arms. Cold rose from the concrete floors as it might from a running refrigerator. Damned Shinra. Damned Hojo. Damned cage.

Cloud stared fixedly into the lab, waiting for the phantom to reappear. His blue eyes were brilliant and unblinking.

"She's looking for someone," he decided.

________________________________________________________________

Pepper was sharing a bed with a man who seemingly had not brushed his teeth or taken a shower since the tender age of eleven. Curled into a miserable man-fetus and sighing every so often, the young assistant was perched at the very end of the bed like a frightened puppy, his sleeping master's bare feet occasionally kicking him in the shoulders. Massive snores tore from his lungs, carrying the putrid odor of his garlicky breath to Pepper's tormented nostrils. His kicking feet had sock gunk between the toes. It was getting on Pepper's pajama top. It smelled faintly of cheese and cabbage.

12:15

Ugh. With a little sigh of disgust and self-pity, Pepper rolled away from the blocky red numbers of the alarm clock glaring at him through the darkness. Around him slept four other loudly snoring scientists, their breathing deafening in the bedroom's quietude. Pepper had to rise in seven hours. For a man accustomed to ten hours of blissful slumber a night, that was a sobering thought.

His bedmate gave an especially loud snort and Pepper tried elbowing his foot. A cheesy kick in the nose was his reward. The blow sent him tumbling clean from the bed and he landed on the floor chin-first, the impact sending a jolt of aggravating pain through his skull. He was embarrassed for a moment but then remembered the rest of the room was asleep. He climbed painfully to his feet and cursed as loud as he could, trying to wake the load of fatheads up and make them just as miserable and tired as he was.

"Self-concerned, bloated, thoughtless, senseless, stinking sons of bitches! Bed-hogging, inconsiderate, congested failures and cows!"

Not a single reaction.

Pepper indignantly dusted off his pinstripe pyjamas, scratching at his goatee and smearing black hair from his bloodshot eyes. He stood half-crippled and decided to appear pitiful for a moment. Keeping his arms straight at his sides, he stared down at his small spot on the sheets as his bedmate invaded the tiny space with his right foot, belching a snore that made the walls rattle. Pepper whimpered. Then he swore a little more. Then he stomped his foot. He topped off his tantrum by standing a while longer and looking even more pitiful. Nevertheless not a peep from his roommates or the fat bastard whose foot was now cabbaging up his pitiful patch on the bed.

The mansion creaked a lot.

The faint disturbances drew Pepper's short, sleepy attention away from his problems and he slouched in bare feet, trying to distinguish the different soft sounds floating to his ears: Generators humming and the house settling and all manner of bizarre groanings, as though the place had been built atop the back of a giant making noises in its sleep. Pepper held his breath and was perfectly motionless, trying to determine if the floors rose and fell with the giant's ponderous breaths.

Oh, well.

Damning the foot of the bed with an irritated kick, Pepper the intern wandered slowly towards a window, glancing out at the moon in its position all the way at the top of the sky, directly above the mansion's gables. Just a slit, a crescent of yellow, and so the town outside the window was almost completely shadowless. It was like looking at a dim blue image of afternoon. Kinda eerie. Pepper put his fingers to the glass and peered closer, trying to make things out in the small, sleeping village. A few lights on, scattered here and there, but most were asleep. Very few sounds came in from outside, just the wark of a few chocobos tied before a home down the street, a woman’s raucous laugh from a pub, a far-away television blasting out of a kid’s bedroom window. But it all seemed very distant, with the action down there, and Pepper up here on the second floor of the looming mansion, engulfed in the snores of his coworkers.

A flit of white near Nibelheim’s inn caught the man’s unfocased attention. It was a very blurry vertical strip of shimmering light hanging around the doorway of the silent building, hovering almost and strangely enough casting no shadow. Pepper narrowed his eyes to make it out better but it got blurrier instead of clearer so he pressed his nose to the glass and stared. But the moment he moved his head closer to the window, the white disappeared.

Pepper moved back again, and the white reappeared. It was bigger now, not necessarily moving closer to the mansion from the Inn, but simply staying where it was and just growing larger. Maybe ten feet tall? the assistant mused. But then maybe just a trick of the light. Pepper moved forward again and it disappeared again. Stepping away from the window the white was there once more; huge now, almost taking up half the pane and not really seeming like it was outside at all anymore.

What the hell..?

Oh! It was a reflection! Duh.

It was only a reflection of something already in the room - a reflection of light from the fixtures in the hall or the alarm clock intermittantly blocked by his bobbing head. Pepper shrugged and stepped away, wondering if he was dreaming. The bedroom had become so bright...

He stiffened in fear upon turning into a nimbus of powdery incandescence. The source of the reflection stood at his back like an assassin ready to slip a knife between his ribs—

Or, like a woman. More accurately, the spectre of what had once been a woman. She was breathtaking with a beauty ethereal; the sort of beauty only the dead knew; beauty that surpassed the flesh, But the ghost was sad too, white-clad, her dark hair contrasting with the bright blaze her clothes and streaming over her breasts like rich dark chocolate. It reflected her own light and shone brilliantly, framing a face that wasn't there. She looked as though some rude boor had smudged his thumb over her features, reducing them to faint suggestions of bright pink lips, blurred but brilliant blue eyes, dark arching brows like sepia ink bleeding into water. She was a ruined painting, marred by indelicate hands.

With little movement save for the occasional stray strand of her hair blowing in an invisible breeze, she stood somber there in the middle of the quiet bedroom. Save for her face and hands, the white vestments shrouded her; bound her. Her fingers were clasped at her abdomen, as pale and fragile as the porcelain hands of a doll. Pepper stared from them to her expressionless, unfocused eyes.

"B-b-but the Professor said there weren't any ghosts..." he stuttered, brows smashing together in consternation. He backed away, terrified but intrigued. "Only the m-metaphorical kind. That's what he _said._ "

She did not reply. Pepper pressed himself against the wooden wall and stared with fish-eyes, wishing to God the fat pigs in the beds would wake up. Was he dreaming? Was he dreaming?! A photo... Maybe if he could take a photo... A fine idea if he had a camera on him! Wild and wavering, his thoughts hurtled through his head in a panic, leaving him petrified, staring as she stared. Did the spectre want something of him? Or was it going stare at him all night, all pretty and shimmering in the darkness? She looked nearly familiar... A relative? Some ancestral ghost? He had no relatives in Nibelheim that he knew of... No, Pepper couldn't place her bearing, the shape of her watercolour face, but there was something here he _knew_.

"Who are you?" he asked boldly, daring to stretch out a hand. It shook embarassingly and he immediately withdrew it, hiding it in his pajama pants pocket. "Is this mansion yours? Do you haunt this place? Are we intruding?"

It sounded like the plot of a bad movie, but maybe he had gotten it just right. Holding his breath, he tilted at the waist, trying to see all the way around the ghostly woman. She paid him no mind. In fact, Pepper thought suddenly that she was pointedly ignoring him. Soundless, neither her clothing rustling nor her breaths (if she breathed at all) audible, she slowly revolved from him. After a pensive moment, she began drifting again towards the door of the silent bedroom, her head slightly bowed, her hands yet clasped mournfully at her waist. Pepper took a few steps after her, lips parted in fascination.

"Wait," he whispered, "What do you want?"

She did not seem evil nor threatening nor hazardous. In fact, just being near her, Pepper could feel emanating her impotent sadness; a horror and an agony pulling at every intangible fiber of her soul. To be able to ease that agony and see relief in her pain-clouded face, that seemed very appealing to Pepper suddenly. "Please," he softly called, "What do you want?"

From the bedroom she drifted into the hall without turning, shunning all extraneous gestures. Pepper followed like a humbled acolyte in the presence of his mistress, begging for an answer to his question.

"Vincent," she finally sighed and Pepper blinked twice. He didn't know anyone with that name. Should he try his luck asking for a description? Perhaps not.  
An ambling, silent procession, the ghost and the man moved down the hallway, the floor creaking hideously beneath Pepper's feet. It did not respond to the spectre's weightless footsteps. The only sounds were the creaks and groans of the basement generators and the muffled street noises from outside. A chocobo shrieked somewhere distant as a wolf bayed from the mountains. Oblivious, the scientists snored. Pepper heard them less and less as he and his silent guide turned down halls and crossed dark, dusty, ancient rooms that even the ghost's light couldn't completely penetrate. Eventually they paused in a pitch black room loaded with rotting furniture and smelling of mildew and disuse. He recognized it immediately from earlier that evening: the hidden entrance to the labs and Library. There was a switch on the wall - something weird and impractical and gothic like the rest of this insane and impractical facility - that led downstairs.

The ghost didn't wait for Pepper to point this out verbally. She passed through the wall without a sound and left him alone in a very black, very frightening room.

"Agh! Wait for me!"

He threw himself against the cold stone, knowing there was a way inside if he could only find it. One had to press a certain stones, and there would be a pressure-sensitive switch behind it and then the hidden door would swing open. Yes. His hands moved feverishly over the chilly rock and he chafed his knuckles, swearing viciously at the invisible sting. Pepper thought he was going insane. He didn't know why he was so desperate to follow the spectre - or if he was even awake - but the idea of never knowing if he had truly seen a ghost this night was maddening. He had to be certain she was real - that he could trust his senses! That empiric observation was _not_ all for naught!

Ah-ha!

There came a muted click and a stone beneath his eager hands slipped into the wall. A grinding of gears made Pepper jump backwards as the hidden doorway revealed itself, then slid into the rock and away. A dark spiral staircase loomed. Mildew, dust, and sewage stank. Rickety wooden stairs descended into a dank abyss.  
But Pepper gave the smell and damp hardly a thought. He sighted a glimmer of white at the far-away bottom of the passage and immediately gave chase, ignoring the glint of cobwebs and the thick slime coating the walls when he put a hand to them to steady himself.

These stairs were just as creepy-- no, even _creepier_ than they'd been earlier that evening when he'd been in the dubiously comforting presence of his colleagues on their way to meet Professor Hojo. No one stood complaining superciliously at his elbow now. He was alone in a stairwell that, in this damned darkness, might as well be the throat of a monster. He smeared slick mold off his hands, staining his pajamas and trying not to think about what was crawling in the darkness. He could hear the chirp of bats, chittering to each other in the rafters but kept at bay by something he couldn't identify. That thing he was following maybe. Maybe she kept them away.

Another careful step forward and Pepper began wishing he'd slipped on a pair of shoes before going ghost-hunting. An unlucky, two-inch long roach squished unpleasantly beneath his heel. His heart pounded in his chest loud as a cowbell, berating its owner for unnecessary stress. Another cockroach crunched and wriggled underfoot. Pepper swallowed a scream. Terrified and disgusted, he catapaulted down the remaining stairs and arrived alive at the bottom, bent over double, hands on his knees and panting into his chest. Cold sweat stood out on his forehead and he shakily wiped it away. Where was he now?

He lifted his head and fell backwards against the nearest wall. Ick, bad idea. Swearing loudly, he catapaulted forward again, noticing something wet on the stones behind him seeping through his pajama top. And he could feel loose dirt beneath his toes; the bitterly cold draft of AC from a room down the hall; yellow light from there too and Pepper remembered that the Library lay closeby. He was in the hall leading up to it, that scary hall that looked as though it had been carved right from the living rock. His vision adjusted a bit and he could see the stairs behind him, a dim blue rectangle hundreds of feet above revealing the doorway he’d come through. He wiped a hand over his face, flinging sweat away, then straightened, trying to regain his composure. Soft noises in the dark. Something warm and furry scampered over his bare left foot and Pepper nearly fell backwards in a dead faint.

“Just a rat...” he mumbled, squeezing his eyes shut and regaining his balance, “Just a rat.”

That glimmer of white was before him again, he could see it through his shut eyelids. The young assistant dropped his hands in his pockets and stepped forward, breathing shallow to avoid inhaling any cobwebs. The buzzing of the distant mako generator filled his ears. And the stupid creaking of the house. And his damned obnoxious heartbeat.

The woman glowed from the darkness like a white feather set against the blackest of velvet and Pepper was almost instantly drawn forward by the grief emanating from her featureless face.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, shivering in the chilly air of the hallway, trying to ignore the unnamed slimy things he couldn’t see underfoot. She did not answer, only moved forward further, as soundless as before. No footsteps, no breathing, no rustling of clothes. Like a passing breeze she moved through the hall, lighting up the way just enough for Pepper to follow. When that whispering breeze finally abated, it was before a very small, very beat up door embedded in the grey rock. The door was ancient, older than the mansion could possibly be, wood rotted and stained with dampness yet carved all over with hellenistic vines; ivy that creeped around the handle, curled and bent in on itself in strange, intriguing patterns. Pepper ran his fingers over the carving, admiring the intracacy. He’d heard something about Nibelheim having a history of fine artisans, old men must have sat together around a fire hundreds of years ago and made these beautiful vines, modeled each of these tiny leaves. Vines... to hide what? he wondered. They seemed rather like the sorts of creepers that you'd see grown over tombstones or the same as grew up the sides of the mansion itself. The beautiful plants were certainly out of place in this hellish hallway, that was for sure. Perhaps they were there as a gift to those unfortunate enough to be buried beneath the earth in this crypt. Crypt. That word came to Pepper's mind out of nowhere but if he didn’t know better, he’d have sworn that there was a tomb to be found beyond this door. Latin letters carved upon it read: _To sleep in the earth and to live in the sky._ Well, something like that anyway, his Latin wasn’t the best.

The mysterious woman stood before this newly discovered doorway expectantly and Pepper watched her, eyes moving from the door to her face. What she wanted seemed obvious enough. “I’ll try,” he sighed and moved forward. The doorknob was rusted shut and he cut his hand trying to wrench it around. It was locked too, he could hear the catch clicking in the hold as he yanked. He messed with it for a full five minutes before shrugging his shoulders and backing off, smearing away red rust and redder blood on his pants.

“Sorry. It’s locked.”

But she didn’t let him off that easily. She stood at his side piteously, moving her deathly white hands up to her throat, and then clasped them there in what seemed like desperate supplication. The portrait of longing nearly broke poor Pepper’s tired heart and he redoubled his efforts on the stubborn doorknob, filling the dark hallway with a flood of curses as it refused to budge. “Nothing’s cooperating tonight,” he muttered, backing off again. He surveyed the thick slab of wood, quick black eyes forgetting how sleepy they were and running over the carving, the knob, the hinges a-- the hinges... hmm...

Pepper stooped in the dirt and peered closer at the hinges. Yup. Solid, Nibelheim craftsmanship, sturdier now than they’d been when first cast. He reached a hand out and neatly plucked a five inch long iron rod from the bottom hinge. Then he repeated the action with the middle and top ones, flinging the little pieces of metal to the dirt. “Stuff was built sturdier years ago,” he said conversationally to his silent companion, “But the builders were stupider.”

She didn’t answer, nor did she make any sign that she was glad he’d managed to get the door open. Pepper shrugged and ignored the creature. He actually didn’t care what she thought, he’d been curious to see what was behind this door since he’d first noticed it that evening. If she wanted to see too, that was fine, but he’d go in either way. The curious little scientist in him insisted.

Holding his breath, every inch of his body trembling in excited fear, Pepper pushed with both hands on the door. It was stuck to the wall, glued there by mold and time, but he threw his full weight against it and with a deafening crack it split away from the frame, swinging forward and coming away completely as the lock on the other side shattered and split. Splinters, chips of rust and a deluge of dust choked the air, making the young assistant dart an arm up to cover his mouth and nose.

After it had cleared a degree, Pepper uncovered his eyes and stared forward, trying to make out the newly revealed space beyond. But he’d never seen such an all-consuming darkness as what faced him now. Groping around in the hallway outside, he found an overhead light and switched it on. Enough of the yellow illumination drifted into the room for the man to get a vague idea of what lay inside. Light glinted off of oblong shapes in the dimness and other strange objects scattered on the floor. He stepped inside and sharp, hard shards of _something_ crunched underfoot or cut into the soft flesh of his toes and heels. He forgot all about the thing that had led him downstairs and instead moved further into the silent room. The atmosphere inside was pristine and cold, like a mountaintop at night, yet this room was hundreds of feet underground.

Bones. That’s what these crunching things were. Shaking violently, covered in cold sweat, Pepper knelt and hefted half a shattered skull up in his hands. It grinned at him in the dim yellow light from the hallway and he flung it away spasmadically, unable to bear that musty smell, or the feel of dry bone against his fingers. Bones everywhere, old bones and whole skeletons piled against the walls. And coffins. Coffins laying sealed, coffins laying open, contents spilling out, laying in the dirt. This was a tomb, he realized, eyes opened wider than they’d ever been in his life, this was a tomb and those vines carved into the door were reminders. A bit of life captured in rotted wood, sealed here to torture the unseeing eyes of the dead with what they could no longer have. Dozens of skulls looked upon the living intruder as he stared back at them, dozens of glinting eyes from the shadows; rats and bats and crawling things. Roaches tickled his bare feet and Pepper stood stock still in wordless horror, wondering how in the hell he’d wound up down here. An insect looking something like a very long-legged spider crawled halfway up his leg before he found the self-control enough to kick it away with his other foot. He wanted to turn around and leave this terrible place but there were things here so intriguing that they overwhelmed his fear with curiosity and Pepper stepped forward into the gloom.

The room was full of coffins, they’d been flung about as though nothing at all, sitting in the darkness like horrible promises. Pepper didn’t dare go too close, he’d seen his share of horror movies where hands shot out of coffins and pulled unsuspecting young guys like him to their deaths. No, he gave them a wide berth as he tramped deeper into the room, wondering how he was managing to keep calm considering where he was and what was with him. The woman seemed unperturbed. She stood in the doorway, not daring to enter. She was frightened. Pepper noticed with a little start that she was as frightened as he of the skulls and the coffins and the reak of death and time permeating this place. She was a damned ghost and she was scared. Pepper found that amazingly funny.

There were old bones falling out of cavities in the walls and he could hear the rats fearlessly digging about in them. Moving past the grisly spectacle, shuffling through the debris, he came to what he roughly figured was the center of the room. A couple more coffins there, all of them sealed, not desecrated and robbed as the others had been. Before he could stop himself, Pepper laid a hand on one of the caskets, a massive oaken box stained black and purple with the passage of time. The carving on this one was almost as ornate as what had been on the door. Skulls this time though, skulls and bones to match those laying all over the rest of the room. Pepper guessed they probably stood for all the men the soldier entombed within had slain before death had claimed him. Quite a warrior he’d been, there were many inscribed here. A new addition though. Someone had scrawled _Ars Gratia Artis_ atop the casket’s lid in permanent black marker. _Ars Gratia Artis_.... Pepper quickly translated it in his head. _Art for Art’s sake._ Hmph. Sounded like the kinda crap that Professor Hojo went around muttering.

The other caskets weren’t nearly as interesting as this one, they were plain wood or stone with elaborate inscriptions in Latin so complex that he couldn’t hope to translate. This central one though was quite intriguing, some of the archeology goons back in Midgar would have had a field day with it.

For no particular reason at all, the wind began to pick up in the small quiet tomb. This alarmed Pepper just a bit as he knew there was no where it could possibly be coming from. He turned about, the lone bulb in the hallway that provided the scant light being caught by the wind and throwing shadows all over. Light danced in erratic patterns on the walls, danced in the empty eye sockets of the skulls. Dust and dirt got caught up in it and blew in his face.

The woman was unaffected by the sudden violent blasts. She stood in the doorway and watched Pepper try to shield his eyes from the flying grit, her hands together over her breasts, fingers entwined in the soft white silk bunched just over her collarbones as though trying to find warmth, shivering as though cold. “Cut it out!” he begged, unable to open his eyes, but seeing her illumination through his eyelids anyway. He knew she was watching him. “Please, I didn’t do anything, cut it out with the wind!”  
She was listening apparently for the storm subsided a bit and then died away to little more than random chilly gusts. Pepper looked to the woman for an explanation but she only lifted one of her small, pale hands and pointed towards the casket at his side.

“What?”

She kept her finger pointed, her expression vacant. And then she vanished.

She simply disappeared. Now, he’d seen those specials on tv where magicians made things vanish and known that what he was watching was an illusion. They always put a curtain or something up so you couldn’t see how they were tricking you. But Pepper knew they were tricks nonetheless. This though... there’d been no curtain. She’d been there, standing in the doorway, and now she was gone. He was utterly alone in this bone-studded room. And the skulls drawn into the coffin at his side seemed to look up at him, ask what the skinny little man was going to do next. So quiet suddenly, he could almost hear the echoes of their hollow laughter. So quiet he fancied he could hear things from the distant Library, the specimens? Low voices as they whined in their uneasy sleeps. He took a step backwards and tripped on something that rolled beneath his heels and threw him off balance. The assistant landed sprawled in the dirt, decomposed flesh from nearby corpses leaving discoloured flakes on his already dirty pajamas. He brushed it off in a panic, then reached for what he’d tripped over, suddenly desiring a weapon, whatever it was.

A hammer.

Pepper shot to his feet, hefting the heavy hammer in both hands but of course there was nothing to fight off. Just the same dark, empty tomb. He lowered his weapon, rather glad that no one was there to see him looking like such a complete and total idiot, and then turned about in place, making sure it was safe.

The bats resumed their chirping, the rats resumed their digging, and he approached the coffin again, head cocked to one side to take the whole thing in. Unlike the others, this one was nailed shut. Strange though, you never nailed a coffin shut in a tomb, it was pointless. You just set the heavy lid down over the casket and sealed it up. Pepper didn’t know much about the funerary business, but he was pretty sure of this. Kinda weird... Just for kicks, his dug his fingernail up under the edge of the lid and gave a little pull. Yeah... the wood was pretty rotted, it flaked away with just a minimal amount of pressure. If he really wanted to, he could probably pry this sucker open with this hammer.

Something suddenly occurred to Pepper.

This tomb and these coffins were at least a hundred, probably two-hundred years old. Yet the nails in this coffin he stood beside now were modern. This hammer in his hand... this was something he could pop down to the hardware store and pick up for a couple gil. What the hell? Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who’d been in this crypt since it had been sealed. Someone had come down here at some point, done something unknown, then locked the door behind him and gone on his way, leaving something nailed up inside this coffin; leaving this hammer in the dirt. Suddenly he was very scared.

“Uh... hey...” he whispered, hesitantly tapping his right forefinger on the coffin lid, “Heya, anyone inside there?”

There wasn’t any answer. Of course not! he scolded himself, Whether the body inside here was newer or not, it was still a body in a coffin. And bodies put in coffins, 99.9% of the time, were dead bodies. Dead bodies didn’t answer back unless the person speaking was really drunk. And Pepper had never felt more sober in his life. Still, there was a mystery here, he could feel it in the back of his teeth. Someone had hidden something down here and they hadn't wanted it to be found. Heh heh, but it looked like Pepper had spoiled their plan.

The young man danced in place for a moment, unexplainably excited, like a little kid who’d just found a pirate treasure in his backyard. He hefted the hammer and made up his mind almost instantly. He was gonna pop this sucker open and see what the big secret was. Maybe it had something to do with Professor Hojo, he’d seemed really eager at the meeting tonight to keep people away from these hallway rooms. Perhaps there was some dark secret or wonderful prize entombed here. Yes, definately something though...

The more he looked around, the more true his suspicion seemed. The remains of an ancient skeleton lay bleached white at his feet and the markings showed it had fallen from this very coffin. The corpse had been evicted from his own final rest and something else had stolen in to take his place. Yeah... something was amiss, something was inside here that shouldn’t be. Gritting his teeth, eyes wild with the thrilling nature of his actions, Pepper wedged the back end of his hammer dead into the gap between the lid and the casket. It plunked inside perfectly, the soft decomposing wood giving way with a few moans, breaking into splinters beneath the intruding iron. Once it was wedged inside as far as it would go, he braced himself against the new lever and pushed his weight forward against it. He could feel the shock of each nail as it was slowly drawn from the wood, the entire lid parting from the coffin slowly but surely. He’d been prepared to smell the stench of decay as he opened this prize but instead the rather sterile smell of chemicals came to his nostrils. This intrigued him further and he was desperate to know what this secret was. He ignored the scurrying rats crawling over his bare feet, stopping at his ankles to gnaw on the hem of his sweat soaked pajamas. The bats beginning to take interest in his activities were of no concern. A few twittered about him and he promptly ignored them. The roaches and insects were unimportant too. Just getting this coffin open, unearthing this tremendous secret.

The casket was half open now but it was still so dark, he’d started prying the side of the lid opposite the tomb’s entrance so that the newly upturned slab of wood now blocked the light from the hallway, leaving the interior obscured by shadows. But these shadows were so rich and dark and almost beautiful in a strange way. Panting with exertion, Pepper redoubled his grip on the hammer, already feeling the blisters he’d have the next morning on the palms of his hands. Something bright and sharp was glinting at him from inside, shining out through all that layered blackness... there was light enough to catch it but he couldn’t reach down and pluck whatever it was out. If he let up on the lid now, it would come crashing down again, the wickedly pointed nails eager to pierce through his forearms. So he kept the hammer wedged into the wood, eyes glued on the glint of gold, yeah, it seemed like gold, that was becoming more and more visible with each inch he raised the lid.

A body yeah, he could tell it was a body inside but that was all. A body and then that golden shine, something metal... unyielding and cruelly pointed in places, all of it hidden in those luxurious shadows. Just a bit more and he’d reach down and take it out and it would be his and something marvelous would come of this discovery, he was sure. Just a bit more.

Suddenly there were three glints in the coffin below him. The shine of gold... and then the shine of two open eyes.

On instinct and in a panic, Pepper cried out and tried to step back, distractedly thinking that those eyes inside were red as blood. His hammer drew away from the lid and it began to crash back down but then something shot up from inside and shattered the entire slab of wood. Pieces of moldy oak flew against the walls and cut into Pepper’s face and hands. He hefted the hammer up in defense of himself but it was too late. He couldn’t get away fast enough.

That glint of gold revealed itself to be a massive five-fingered claw and it was bronze, not gold. And it was murderous, not wonderful as he’d hoped. The young assistant screamed out in terror, praying someone would hear, praying something would happen.

Shadows still hiding him, the casket’s occupant lunged out of his prision like a demon, faster than Pepper could follow with his eyes, and that claw was all he could see beyond the black shape of an otherwise human form. The bright claw and the bright eyes. And the eyes were fixed right on him. He screamed again, and tried to fall backwards, but the claw wouldn’t let him fall. As he watched, unbelieving, it swooped down without pause and hooked through his pajama top into his stomach. For just the space of a thought, the metal felt cold against his flesh. But then there was only the merciless burning of pure pain and Pepper’s hands shot out to wrap around the freezing bronze arm attached to the cruel claw, his grip slipping as blood ran from his wounds and coated the metal.

_“...help..!”_ he gasped, and the claw twisted within his stomach as a response, twisting the inside of his gut into an unsalvageable mess of blood and tissue. But then it all withdrew in a flash of warmth and Pepper slumped to the dirt, landing on his side. He opened his eyes, barely conscious from the pain, the world swimming in dizzying circles before him. Shadows and blackness and skulls grinning at him from the base of the opened coffin. His hands went down to his stomach but he couldn’t really register the things he felt there. His trembling arms dropped and he stared ahead, trying to speak and call for help again only he couldn’t find the words. Then the blood-slicked claw was in his face again and he saw a pair of feet as naked as his own standing there in the dirt. He turned his head up feebly, prepared to plead for his life, to offer whatever this monster was with whatever it wanted in return for mercy. But just a look into those red eyes and he knew his words would be wasted. The claw came down and neatly tore through his throat, ripping out his windpipe in a flash of red and pain lasting but a few seconds. Pepper didn’t have any last thoughts coherent enough to mention. Warmth, then cold, then nothing.

His body lay in the dirt, and the blood quickly pooling about it was the most colorful thing in the crypt. The attacker crouched beside him panting hard for a moment, snarling with his breaths, stumbling backwards, staring at what he’d done. And then he fell into the coffin again, his claw hanging limp over the side, catching the yellow light from the hallway, the gore dripping from it looking more like molten gold than blood as it splattered onto the ground.


End file.
